Is My Work Bullshit?

A few years back, I co-authored a paper making the theoretical argument that public discourse was being defined by what we called “the assertive turn.” We argued, very shortly after the January 6 insurrection, that the intellectual tools we, meaning academics, were using to understand society had some big problems—namely the fact that thousands of people got riled up to commit treason over a transparently, easily falsifiable lie (the outcome of the 2020 election, a question Republican officials remain embarrassingly unwilling to answer). There has never been even a hint about US presidential elections being stolen. It is conspiracy, a lie. We argued that this “turn” toward assertion, as compared to reasoned rhetorical debate, represented something profound that deserved more scrutiny and understanding.

Social scientists love turns — they signify some sort of paradigmatic shift or analytical focus. Declaring something a turn does two things: it reifies some sort of shift or emerging analytic frame that might be useful, and it calls readers to adopt that new frame without necessarily discarding the frame that came before. The most famous turn is the Linguistic Turn of the 1970s, where philosophers chose to focus more intently on the way language and communicating through language shapes society (I am simplifying probably too much, but I don’t want to get bogged down so please forgive me). But there are all sorts of turns — the turn of affect, the emotional turn, the interpretive turn, the scientific turn, the postmodern turn… turns are everywhere. They are useful! But maybe overdone?

So, here’s the thing: we are surrounded by bullshit, not exclusively but I think mostly from right wing influencers and their moderate legitimizers, in an effort partly to enable the extremist turn in Republican politics (there’s a turn again) and partly to avoid having to grapple with what an extremist party governing the country really means for society. But it exists everywhere, the bullshit, from literature (Lionel Shriver emigrating across the ocean while whining about immigration) to national security to education. Bullshit is everywhere. Here’s a recent example:

You’re free to look up what kind of a thinker this is (essentially, a professional identity politics warrior who complains that everyone else is doing identity politics, much like Shriver, or maybe more pointedly a dishonest partisan hack, again like Shriver). Importantly: this is bullshit, and you can tell because it is premised on a calloused disregard of the truth. The answer to Harper’s question is an obvious no, not for any reason he tries to prefigure in that tweet, but because a philosopher (ethicists are philosophers) would not be working in a Gender Studies department. They are different fields with different epistemologies and different analytical focus in their work. Harper knows this. He does not care, because he is spewing bullshit. He isn’t trying to replace one thing with another, he isn’t doing any meaning-making. He is just making shit up, playing for the very wealthy conservatives who subsidize any work to de-fang the academy.

But, isn’t that also just assertion? Someone criticized our work along these lines when we were going through peer review: “the assertive turn” sounds a lot like bullshit. But I don’t think this is right. We defined assertion as “overwhelming deliberation,” or the public argument, ad nauseam, about matters of fact that already have broad acceptance. In the content of January 6, this meant Republicans kept trying to question the 2020 election results, despite no evidence that any cheating occurred. In the context of, say, trans people, that means ignoring mountains of evidence about the necessity and importance of gender-affirming care (or ignoring the actual impact of trans athletes) to instead use government violence to enforce arbitrary gender thresholds.

I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as bullshit. Bullshit, at least the way people usually use it in this context, is generally defined as an indifference to the truth-value of a statement. President Trump is a good example of bullshit: he makes statements and uses words without any real regard for what they mean or what he’s “really” saying. He just doesn’t care: that’s bullshit. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s spokesperson during his first term, is another helpful example (and she is good at this: she gave us the phrase “alternative facts”). I think the assertive turn, the increasing prevalence of using the tools of argument to question an actual truth and replace it with another, is doing something else. Look at the stock assertive phrases one might imagine in this context: trans people don’t exist, universities discriminate against white people, news media are liberal, DEI doesn’t work, men love math and women love cooking, and so on. I don’t think people say these things with a disregard for whether they’re true or not. Rather, they are trying to make those things true by force of will: repeat it enough the reality really will seem to shift (as sadly has happened with LGBTQ acceptance).

So, I think assertion is doing something different than bullshit. When I operationalized the assertive turn into a study of corporate leadership (using Blackrock CEO Larry Fink as an example), I found that assertion drives corporate messaging: Fink doesn’t have a disregard for the truth. He wants certain things to be true, and argues for them: he is trying to manifest a reality, first about the need for ESG investment, then purpose-driven enterprises, and most recently reneging on all of that under withering pressure from Republican officials. I think the Republican response to Fink’s success in centering ESG investment strategies in corporate strategy would constitute bullshit: you can see their justifications for outlawing it shifting, from a normative argument about “wokeness” (recently declared unconstitutional!) to increasingly convoluted arguments about how only oil companies can have their interests safeguarded in shareholder analysis. That’s bullshit, where it’s clear nothing matters beyond some short term, instrumental goal. Fink isn’t doing that — he is asserting, using his will to bring about a reality.

So, I am sticking with my assertive turn language for now. It is useful for understanding claims in the public that seem false, but maybe aren’t intuitively and obviously so, and importantly which might seem to have a factual basis. Take the recent moves by the Trump administration to link college funding to lifetime earnings in an effort to address the affordability crisis for higher education. It isn’t obvious bullshit — afterall, many people who do have college degrees feel like, once they accounted for the cost of attending school, that they were left worse off. The data, of course, tell a much more complicated story: people who attend for-profit colleges feel like their degree is low-value, as do people who spend money on attending classes but never finish their major. Self-assessment for lifetime earnings is also notoriously unreliable as a measurement of monetary outcomes: people might feel like they’re thriving less than peers, but the data show conclusively that college educated people make more money and have higher employment, that this has been true for decades, and while lifetime earnings are being eaten up by student loans the graduates still prosper at far higher rates than non-college graduates.

The Trump administration, in other words, is making educational policy based on bullshit. A college education is extremely expensive, and became so in a very short period of time to an alarming extent when compared to inflation. And much of that expense is directly attributable to Republican policymaking: the 2005 bank reforms made it nearly impossible to discharge student debt in bankruptcy, creative a massive moral hazard for colleges and private loan companies to relentlessly jack up the cost of attending school. After all, the borrowers will be on the hook for life, so what’s to lose? There are other incentives at work making college too expensive for people; you’ll rarely, if ever, see a Chancellor advocate for lowing tuition and scaling back capital investment to address this crisis, which is how real non-profits handle budget uncertainty. There are no incentives to cut back on costs, only to drive up prices.

The structural reasons behind expensive university are hard to solve because they took a long time to get in place. That makes bullshit policies like the “do no harm” thing from the Department of Education so seductive: they offer the promise of an easy answer when the reality is, the people pushing that policy do no care. No one in Linda McMahon’s inner circle really cares about whether colleges are educating people: she is explicitly part of a movement trying to destroy higher education. The facts don’t really matter to this mission: neither McMahon, nor her fellow travelers Tyler Austin Harper, are arguing to replace one version of reality with another. They just want to destroy. Facts don’t matter, only endings.

Assertion isn’t quite that. Facts, as I argued in that essay, do actually care about feelings. We often ignore or downplay facts when our feelings are involved. But that doesn’t mean we just disregard them. Bullshit requires ignoring facts. You aren’t building a reality, you are just trying to distract and destroy. From my perspective, that makes the “assertive turn” really interesting as a frame for understanding our socio-political system: there is bullshit, for sure, but there’s also something interesting and upsetting happening with the way people are trying to berate each other into believing things. I don’t fully know what to do with the idea beyond diagnosing a particular dynamic in public discourse I think is not captured by terms like bullshit or misinformation, but also I think that diagnostic process is important.

What do you think? Am I out in left field or does this make sense?