Sublime

CHARACTER.

The superego is the hyperdeveloped brake system for human initiative.

Frankfurt’s astute observation of where that leads us feels prophetic in 2017. He argues that once we decide that it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, we simply resort to being true to ourselves. This, to me, is the birthplace of one of the great bullshit problems of our time: the “you’re either with us or against us” argument.

The truth is that our public life consists almost exclusively of small men. Our public men are small because they have to prove that they are in the commonplace interpretation clever, because they have to pass examinations, to learn codes of manners, to imitate a fixed type. It is in private life that we find the great characters.

However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity that resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated, e

Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, an

Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.

one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.