The Bullshit Industrial Complex

I heard an interview today with a set of professional marketers discussing the new Washington State slogan:" Say WA? " Yes, it's that stupid. It makes "Alaska B4 U Die," look like a zen koan. They used a particular phrase: "effective branding is rooted in truth," such as Vegas' "What happens here, stays here." But the nuance is that actual truth is not important at all, except in that what is similiar to truth is persuasive, and therefore, of great economic value.

Remembering an interview with Prof. Frankfurt on his pop philosophy essay "On Bullshit," (and avoiding additional bullshit, I will admit that I have not yet read it properly), got me thinking about the purely economic role of bullshit. According to Frankfurt, the esssence of bullshit is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. A New Yorker article relates an anecdote he uses about Wittgenstein (again, it has been at least 15 years since I've read any Wittgenstein).

The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree. To push the analysis in a new direction, he considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. “You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like,” he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt guesses, was its mindlessness: “Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”

Of course, this makes Wittgenstein a rather bad friend who failed to demonstrate compassion when his friend had her tonsils out. (Did they go out for drinks later? Probably not. I seem to remember he died alone.) But the salient point is that bullshit in the modern world is ubiquitous; it is why identity and truth- and art for that matter- why social relations are so poisoned, are in such immient danger of being snowed under an unrelenting blizzard of B.S.

My question is why? I'm coming up an economic answer:

The modern economy relies on the steady production of bullshit, as a commmodity which is bought and sold. It has tremendous value. (So does caustic soda, heptane, and plutonium). Bullshit has value because it detaches what we value from where it normally lies and reattaches it to an economically desirable location: a traditional example would taking physical beauty and attaching it to a product rather than a person. (This is done it art all the time, attaching physical beauty to the product of a sculpture or a painting, or a movie, which is then sold - art's saving grace is that by Frankfurt's definition, art is not indifferent to truth; and that is only of course true when it is true). Yet marketing, which last I heard described as 1/7th of the whole US economy, is only part of it.

So I'm coming up with an example list of the American Bullshit sector, the actual goods and services part of the economy which produces or purchases bullshit as a real expense or product, defining bullshit as economic activity related to information dissemination, but which has no substantive regard for truth. One might think of Bullshit sector investment, such as hiring a real estate agent, a marketer, or a cool agent, reporting to companies what kids think is "cool." In honor of my macro class long, long ago, let us call this Bullshit Industrial Complex B1:

Marketing; Media and Entertainment, Real Estate, government and public relations (as an economic activity), Sales (All sectors: my god, think of the cash value); the Libertarian Party, Fashion and clothing, you get the idea... I would include large portions of religious activity, considerably smaller sections of education, and a good measure of the Internet. Maybe most of it. I should say that I would EXCLUDE for-real bull fertilizer, as that is a useful and valuable physical commodity.

So my question is: what is the actual value of B1? If marketing is already 1/7th of the whole economy, lets us say - while maintaining the appearance of a genuin interest in truth, that B1 is about 1/4 US GNP. In 2005 was about $11 Trillion. So we have a very rough estimate of the U.S.B.S. Sector last year: $2.75 Trillion.

One question is: can we call bullshit on that, without bringing wrack and ruin to America? Another point: when you stand up against bullshit, you are taking on economic interests that are weighing in around 3 trillion dollars.

I retreat, for the moment, into my long-time aesthetic mystery: where is anyone?