“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful.” This quote, along with 47 references to or surrounding the word “phony”, appear in the classic american novel “The Catcher in the Rye” (which most kids in the United States have to read before completing high school).
Teens see this message everywhere: lying, being inauthentic and bullshitting your way through life is bad; yet everybody does it. High schoolers and college students bullshit essays and term papers, adults bullshit their way through job interviews and employers suck up to their boss by telling them exactly what they want to hear. So if bullshitting is so commonplace in society, why has it had such a negative stigma attached to it?
“There are three types of bullshit,” said Champlain College Professor of Rhetoric, Michael Kelly. In Kelly’s terms the three types are: 1. the type that people who, when pressed for more answers on a subject, make things up in a way that seems reasonably credible; 2. the obstruction of the truth, e.g. something that is not completely true but not completely false either; and 3. brainstorming bullshit.
The first kind of bullshitting that Kelly describes relates most directly to college students. “It’s when the professor wants you to write a five-page paper, and when you have about three and a half pages of good ideas, you start restating the things you’ve already said in slightly new ways [to reach page count],” said Kelly.
Core Professor at Champlain College, Kelly Thomas sees this type of bullshitting a lot in her classes and she can, in most cases, pick up on it. “In writing, it gets really smarmy. It gets repetitive and vacuous. The voice that I hear in class, that authentic voice offering opinions, is suddenly absent and I could be reading Jane Doe[‘s work]—I don’t even know who i’m reading. It just blends together. It’s just generic student talk.”
According to Thomas, this kind of “mealy-mouthed” work isn’t what she’s looking for. “I want students to still try, but I don’t want to students to not be themselves. Better that you write me one full page of what you really think, in a way that you think is powerful, than three pages of what you think I want you to say.”
However, some students in Thomas’ class argued that they found this type of bullshitting to be a clever rhetorical device that requires a lot of effort, that learning to pander to your audience and give them what they want is important. Kelly agrees.
“I wouldn’t call that bullshitting. I would call that rhetorical awareness. That’s where the line between rhetorical strategies and bullshit becomes super thin. Being aware of what your audience looks for is not bullshit. It’s what good writers do,” said Kelly.
Kelly and Thomas both agree that many students become programmed to bullshit because of the pressures that they face in this day and age. “I think the expectations on students now are so high for you to be these success stories right out of that gate and I think our college really puts a lot of pressure on you to do that and so that pressure forces people to default to bullshit,” said Thomas
“When education feels like a hoop to jump through, it invites bullshit,” said Kelly. Kelly believes students see classes as just the next thing they need to get through to be able to get a job, so they can get money, so they can buy a house and so on which is what causes a lack of caring and a lack of “intellectual fervor”.
Both professors also agreed on the fact that, while it may not be the best option, everybody bullshits. This fact leads into Kelly’s second type of bullshit.
According to Kelly, an example of “obstruction of the truth” bullshitting is when a college says 100 percent of its graduates go into careers that align with the major they studied, when really this truth is stretched because they consider a babysitter who majored in early childhood development to be in a career that they studied for.
This shows that it’s not only students and the younger generation that bullshit their way through life. “Part of being a professional may entail not always being your authentic self. Although we struggle to find that balance of being your professional self and your authentic self, sometimes you need to give people what they want to hear in certain situations and it’s very difficult,” said Thomas
Students share in this regard stating that they wouldn’t talk to their boss the same way they talk to their friends and that’s not a bad thing.
Kelly also states that bullshitting is how “new ideas happen.” He references his third type of bullshit (brainstorming bullshit) and says that when people have nothing else to do, they start bullshitting to create dialogue and sometimes end up creating something.
“Two guys were stranded in the rain in Paris and couldn’t hail a cab and were getting wet when one guy says to the other guy, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool we could just pay one of these cars?’ and the other guy, texting on his phone, says, ‘Yeah, there should be an app for that.’ So the two guys that are sitting in the rain bullshitting in Paris end up creating Uber.”
However, there are negative consequences associated with bullshitting as well. “A negative effect is that it obscures people's ability to tell the truth from a lie sometimes,” said Kelly.
Thomas adds on to this saying that, eventually, people won't be able to tell their true selves from their bullshit selves. “I think it would be really hard to get up everyday and not be you. If you’re just bullshitting for the money, it would get old,” she said.
In a perfect world, everyone would be able to be their authentic selves at all times and be open and honest when they need help or more time because people tend to prefer when others are honest with them; however, realistically, bullshitting is just a part of life. Thomas’ thoughts on this helps to break the negative stigma surrounding the word.
“People do it. I think you always adapt to an audience, if you’re a good rhetor anyway, and some situations require bullshit professionally. They just do. I think a lot of people don’t want to say that or admit that so they put prettier words around that but I just call it bullshit. You just have to be able to find a balance.”
