Frankfurt’s Warning: The Election Speech Wasn’t a Lie — It Was Something Worse
A dead philosopher’s obscure 1986 essay explains why your fact-checkers keep failing you.
It was past midnight when the live fact-checking team at a major news outlet finally gave up.
They had spent the evening annotating a candidate’s stump speech in real time, flagging claims, cross-referencing numbers, pulling up Bureau of Labor Statistics tables on split monitors. And yet, by the end of the night, their scorecard looked strange. Most of the individual sentences were, technically, defensible. A statistic here was three years out of date but not fabricated. A quote there was real, just wrenched from its context like a tooth pulled without anesthesia. Nothing on the page qualified, by the strict definition, as a lie.
And yet every person in that newsroom felt the same low-grade nausea. They had just watched forty-five minutes of speech in which truth was not the point, was not even the target. The speaker hadn’t been trying to deceive them about specific facts. He had been doing something else entirely — something for which their fact-checking apparatus, built painstakingly over decades to detect falsehood, had no tool and no name.
They had built a lie detector, and what walked through the door wasn’t a lie.
There is a word for what they were watching. A philosopher gave it to us almost forty years ago, and it is time we started using it properly.
The Princeton Professor Who Said the Unsayable Word
In 1986, Harry Frankfurt — a Yale and later Princeton philosopher known for dense, careful work on free will and moral responsibility — published an essay with a title that made librarians blush: “On Bullshit.” It would become one of the most cited pieces of philosophy in the English language, eventually republished as a small hardcover that sat, half-joke and half-manifesto, on bestseller tables for months in 2005.
Frankfurt’s argument was deceptively simple. A liar, he observed, is actually in a peculiar kind of relationship with the truth. To lie effectively, you must know what is true, and then deliberately aim your statement away from it. The liar is playing a game whose rules are set by reality; he is, in Frankfurt’s words, “inescapably concerned with truth-values.” He respects truth enough to hide from it.
The bullshitter is a different creature altogether. He is not concerned with what is true or false. He is not even trying to conceal the truth. He has lost interest in the question entirely. His only concern is whether the words produce the desired effect — admiration, outrage, loyalty, a donation, a vote. Truth and falsehood are, to him, simply raw material, interchangeable, to be arranged for effect the way a set designer arranges furniture: not because the furniture is real, but because it looks right under the lights.
This is why Frankfurt landed on the sentence that should be stitched into the wall of every newsroom in the world: “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” A lie, once exposed, at least reaffirms that truth exists and matters — that’s why the liar bothered lying in the first place. Bullshit corrodes the very idea that there is a truth worth aiming for or hiding from. It doesn’t attack a fact. It attacks the category.
Why We Forgive the Bullshitter and Prosecute the Liar
Here is the detail from Frankfurt’s essay that should unsettle you more than any of it: he noticed that people are, on the whole, far more tolerant of bullshit than of lies.
Think about your own reactions. Catch a politician in a demonstrable lie — a fabricated quote, a fake statistic, an invented meeting — and something in the public snaps to attention. Headlines follow. Careers occasionally end. Lying still carries the residue of sin; we treat it as a moral crime because we still, somewhere, believe in the court where truth is the judge.
But watch that same politician — or executive, or influencer, or cable news anchor — deliver forty-five minutes of vague, sweeping, unfalsifiable assertion, emotionally charged language with no verifiable content, “people are saying,” “everybody knows,” “it’s incredible, really incredible” — and the public shrugs. We roll our eyes. We call it spin, or rhetoric, or “just politics.” We treat it as weather, not crime.
This is precisely why bullshit is the superior weapon. Lying invites scrutiny because it stakes a claim on reality that can be checked and falsified. Bullshit invites nothing, because it never really staked a claim to begin with. You cannot fact-check a vibe. You cannot debunk an applause line that was never asserting anything falsifiable in the first place. The bullshitter has found the one rhetorical mode immune to correction, because correction requires a claim, and he never quite made one.
The Machinery Built to Manufacture It at Scale
What Frankfurt described as a human tendency — an individual choosing indifference to truth over the effort of lying — has since been industrialized.
Consider the modern campaign speech, engineered not by a single speechwriter with a point of view, but by a room of consultants running real-time sentiment analytics, watching which phrases spike engagement on a second-by-second dial-test graph. The speech is no longer composed to describe reality. It is composed to trigger a measurable emotional response, and truth-value is not even a variable in the model. This is bullshit as an engineering discipline.
Consider the cable news panel format, where a guest is invited not because they possess expertise but because they perform conviction convincingly for six minutes between commercial breaks. The format does not select for accuracy. It selects for fluency, confidence, and quotability — precisely the traits Frankfurt identified as the bullshitter’s true toolkit, since a bullshitter, unlike a liar, needs no relationship with the facts at all, only a talent for sounding as though he does.
Consider the algorithmically optimized political ad, A/B tested across a thousand micro-audiences until the version that produces the most shares — not the most accurate version, the most shared one — is pushed to your feed. No human in that pipeline is lying to you. No human in that pipeline cares whether what you’re seeing is true. The entire machine has been optimized around engagement, and truth was never one of its inputs.
This is the structural leap our era has made past Frankfurt’s original diagnosis: bullshit used to be a rhetorical failing of individuals. It is now the default output of institutions engineered, quite deliberately, to be indifferent to truth because indifference to truth is more profitable than commitment to it.
Why This Was Always Going to Happen
It is tempting to blame a particular politician, a particular platform, a particular decade of decline. That temptation should be resisted, because it lets the actual structural force off the hook.
The structural force is this: lying is expensive, and bullshitting is free.
To lie well, you must do the difficult cognitive labor of tracking the truth precisely so you can deviate from it convincingly, then remember your deviation, then maintain it under cross-examination without contradiction. Lying requires memory, consistency, and risk. It is, in the most literal sense, hard work — which is exactly why skilled liars have historically been rare and why getting caught has historically been so costly.
Bullshitting requires none of this. You need not remember what you said, because you were never tracking a fixed reality to begin with; you were only tracking the mood of the room. You need not maintain consistency, because your audience — trained by an environment saturated in constant, low-effort assertion — has stopped expecting it. In an attention economy that rewards volume and immediacy over accuracy and coherence, bullshit isn’t a moral failure. It’s the rational strategy.
This is why the pattern is not a symptom of one bad actor or one broken party. It is the emergent behavior of any system — a newsroom, a campaign, a platform, a boardroom — that pays for engagement and asks no questions about truth-value. Wherever the incentive structure rewards effect over accuracy, bullshit will colonize the space, because it is cheaper to produce and, per Frankfurt’s own observation, far less likely to be punished when discovered.
What Happens to a Society That Loses the Word For This
Here is the stake, and it is larger than any single election cycle.
A society that can still distinguish lies from truth, even while lying constantly, retains something precious: the shared conviction that truth is the thing being fought over. Every lie is, perversely, an act of respect toward reality — a tacit admission that reality exists and that it matters what people believe about it.
A society drowning in bullshit loses that conviction entirely. It stops asking “is this true?” and starts asking only “does this work?” And once a critical mass of public speech operates on that second question exclusively, the very idea of a shared, checkable reality begins to dissolve — not through some dramatic act of censorship, but through sheer attritional indifference. Frankfurt warned that the endgame of pervasive bullshit is not a society full of false beliefs. It is a society that has lost its grip on the concept of belief being answerable to anything at all.
That is a civilizational condition, not a political one. It afflicts the boardroom announcing a “restructuring” as readily as it afflicts the campaign podium. It afflicts the wellness influencer as readily as the news anchor. Once the mechanism is understood, you will start hearing it everywhere — and that recognition, uncomfortable as it is, happens to be the beginning of the cure.
The Discipline of Asking the Boring Question
There is no institutional fix coming for this, no regulation that will restore the incentive to track truth over effect. The fix, such as it is, has to happen at the level of the individual listener, and it is almost embarrassingly modest.
It is simply this: before you ask whether something makes you feel angry, vindicated, or moved, ask whether it is checkable — and then check it. Not because every claim will turn out false, but because the act of asking restores the very thing bullshit depends on you forgetting: that truth is a category, that it exists independently of how a sentence makes you feel, and that some claims are answerable to it while others were never designed to be.
Frankfurt was not asking us to become cynics who assume everyone is lying. He was asking for something quieter and harder: a permanent, unglamorous discipline of noticing when a statement was never really trying to be true in the first place. That discipline will not make headlines. It will not go viral. It is simply the price of remaining a citizen who still believes reality is worth defending — and, at this particular moment, it may be the only defense we have left.