Why Everything is Bullshit
Lessons from Cards Against Humanity co-founder David Pinsof
You don’t want to be happy.
At least, that’s what
thinks.Oh yeah, and your morals? They’re a load of bullshit.
The meaning of life? That’s bullshit as well.
As soon as we stumbled across David’s entertaining and consistently provocative Substack Everything is Bullshit, we had to get him on the show.
David is an evolutionary psychologist with a PhD in Psychology from UCLA, where he studied the evolutionary origins of political bullshit. He has written a handful of academic papers, one of which has been cited 152 times and another of which was quoted in the New York Times.
He is also the co-founder of Cards Against Humanity, which, quite literally, sold people bullshit.
David’s episode lands in your feeds on Thursday, 18 May. In the meantime, here’s a deep dive into some of David’s most perspective-altering ideas.
Background
Links
Everything is Bullshit Substack | Twitter
Essays
Happiness is Bullshit | I Am Not Human | I Don’t Care If You Read This | The Meaning of Life is Bullshit | Morality Is Not Nice | You Should Be Troubled | Preprint: The Evolution of Social Paradoxes
Themes (each unpacked below)
I. Bullshit | II. Status & Signalling | III. Rationalisation | IV. Happiness
I. Bullshit
“Most of what we talk about is why we and other people do things; therefore, most of what we talk about is bullshit. Most of the bullshit reasons we give for our behavior are wrong and self-serving; therefore, most of what we do is bullshit.”
We’re surrounded by bullshit. Most of what we do is bullshit.
David is referring to bullshit in the Harry Frankfurt sense – spouting out whatever we need to say to get the result we want.
What we say is more a product of status & signalling (see Theme II) than it is a pursuit of truth. Rationality and analytical thinking often are just window-dressing for an underlying reason we don’t understand. Most of our explanations are just bullshit we concoct to justify our and others’ behaviour.
A lack of concern with the truth is the essence of bullshit.
Some relevant takeaways from Harry Frankfurt’s book:
For a bullshitter, the fact that a statement is true (or false) is neither a reason in favour nor a reason against. It just doesn’t matter.
Bullshit isn’t necessarily unskilled or from the hip. Advertising, public relations & politics are all full of exquisite examples of bullshit, which have been meticulously crafted & tested.
We take lies personally – someone is intentionally trying to deceive us. We are more likely to shrug off bullshit as it feels less personal.
A lie is dependent on context – it is constrained by the need to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point. Bullshit on the other hand, is context agnostic – a bullshitter does not care about the truth around the lie, and is quite happy to fake the context.
Bullshitting is therefore less analytical and less deliberative than lying. It is more expansive and independent. It is more art than craft.
Liars and truthtellers are playing opposite sides of the same game. Each accept that there is something called ‘truth’ (they just react to it differently). A bullshitter pays no attention to truth whatsoever.
In an age where everything is seen as context specific and the idea of universal truths are unfashionable, bullshit becomes more prevalent. Everything becomes about signalling personal values and status.
Bullshit is so prevalent because in a democracy we all feel like we need to have opinions on everything.
II. Status & Signalling
We are too naïve about signaling games. We think we can escape them. We think there is an “opt out” button we can press at any time. But that button does not exist. We have no choice but to signal. In a judgy species like ours, every little thing we do gets noticed, including the things we don’t do—or the things we say we don’t do while we do them.
No one can opt out of the status game. When people purport to not care about certain social conventions, they are signalling that they are the type of person that doesn’t care. Not caring is a status move.
The absence of something still sends a signal about the something. Not taking a side is like betraying both sides. Not having an opinion is equivalent to having the wrong opinion.
We all desperately want other people to think that we don’t care what they think.
Rather than trying to escape the game, we may as well play it in the right way – send the signals we want people to receive to the people we want to receive them.
Belief in a ‘dark side’ of humanity, or belief that political opponents are acting out of “human nature” e.g. fear, greed etc, are usually forms of humble brags. When someone claims that someone acting undesirably is just “following their nature”, the implication is that the person making the claim is above these concerns, and has thus transcended human nature. This is, you guessed it, bullshit designed to designate status.
Transcending human nature ought to be hard! If we find ourselves casually dismissing the concerns of others as a result of their primal instincts, this suggests that we are trapped by ours in ways that we don’t realise. We are likely rationalising our prejudice and dogma in the language of common sense and modernity (for me on rationalisation see Theme III).
“There is simply no explanation of your political opponents’ beliefs that does not also apply to your beliefs. Assuming your political opponents are humans, this must be the case. You are not exempt from human nature.”
“In the end, we’re stuck. Either our political opponents are normal humans, and we’re vulnerable to the same biases as they are. That’s troubling. Or they are inferior humans, which we know is the exact type of bullshit every human has wrongly believed about their outgroup rivals since the dawn of humanity. Also troubling."
Many social paradoxes (such as showing humility to prove we’re better than other people or trying to gain status by not caring about status) have a common thread: they are attempts to signal a trait while concealing the fact that one is signalling the trait. Status is fragile: it must be signalled without being revealed. When status signalling is revealed, it becomes a cue for low status. This is why status games tend to have a pendulum nature – status games are constantly “collapsing and re-emerging in antithetical forms.”
Sacred values are cover stories designed to prevent status signals from being detected. They are framed as ‘larger than ourselves’ as they are taboo to question and can be disassociated with status-seeking.
III. Rationalisation
If anything is a part of human nature, it’s the tendency to rationalize our prejudice and dogma, to make it seem like it’s not prejudice or dogma at all, but basic decency and common sense. To transcend that part of ourselves is, and ought to be, hard.
As we have seen above, people come up with bullshit explanations for their decisions and the decisions of others. These bullshit explanations are basically rationalisations for underlying reasons that we don’t understand.
What usually drives our behaviour are our primal instincts. We are animals. All the layers of abstraction on top are rationalisations of this basic fact.
When people claim to care about ‘the meaning of life’, they are actually seeking rationalisations for their apelike behaviour. Vague, unfalsifiable statements based around the meaning of life rationalise their values and behaviour in ways that “aren’t obviously wrong enough to make them lose status, but they’re not obviously right enough to make them lose status either.”
“They hit the sweet spot of being vaporous and vaguely plausible, framing all of human behavior as a quest for pleasant abstractions like wisdom, virtue, or—my favorite—happiness.”
“Morality” is a rationalisation of poor behaviour and fuels moral superiority. It is about deluding ourselves into thinking that the actions we naturally want to take are serving the common good.
The idea that morality is about working together to serve the common good is bullshit. If morality evolved by natural selection, then ancestral moralists must have outcompeted amoral rivals. Morality emerged as a tool for social competition and domination: purges, scapegoats, moral panics etc.
Morality is the “parnt of hatred.” It helps you bind others to your tribe. The nice parts live on the surface and serve as rationalisations of the mean parts, which live underground.
But morality also serves a purpose. In the internet age, moral progress has become an arms race – everyone holds social weapons of mass destruction which can be deployed against anyone acting in a purportedly immoral way. Cancel culture pressures us to act in a ‘moral’ way as we are one step away from destruction.
Sacred values are cover stories designed to prevent status signals from being detected. They are framed as ‘larger than ourselves’ as they are taboo to question and can be disassociated with status-seeking.
IV. Happiness
Wrong. You don’t want to be happy. Nobody wants to be happy. The idea that any of us are pursuing happiness, that it’s our most fundamental goal in life, is bullshit. It’s contradicted by almost everything we do.
To want something is to learn how to get it and take it when available. We do not do this with happiness. Happiness is there for the taking, but we don’t do it:
We consume more bad news than good news;
We don’t appreciate what we have;
We only savour 1% of our moments, despite knowing that if we savoured more, we would be happier;
We are not getting better at becoming happy despite years of practicing it;
We maintain relationships with assholes despite them pissing us off; and
We doomscroll.
Self-control helps you tolerate short-term discomfort to achieve a long-term goal. But happiness is the opposite of discomfort, and allegedly is the long-term goal. “So why do you need self-control to tolerate being happy in order to achieve your long-term goal of being happy?”
We’re animals. Happiness is not our number one goal. Happiness is internal to us, not something external we strive for. “It has no connection to survival or reproduction, which kind of has to exist if we evolved to want it.”
We want simple, primitive things. Not happiness. “Once we accept this fact, everything starts to make sense. Why do we read so much bad news? Because scary stuff can kill us and happy stuff can’t. Why are we bored by Positive Psychology? No sex or death in it. Why do we work too much? Status anxiety. Why do we simmer in anger and shitpost on Twitter? Dominance. Why do we beat ourselves up and stay friends with assholes? Submission. Why do we have kids, even though they make us miserable? Come on.”
Happiness and motivation are distinct. Yet we tend to lump them together. We think that happiness is what causes us to be motivated, but this is wrong. We don’t need happiness to motivate us.
Happiness is what our brain does when things are better than expected.
We are not directly pursuing happiness. We are chasing the sort of things that made us happy in the past. The objects of our desire are associated with happy memories. “The more you get what you want, the more predictable it becomes, and the less you enjoy it when you get it. You’re not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.”
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