Is There Too Much Bullshit in Your Opinions?
An honest take at self-diagnosing lack of honesty.
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On a scale from honest opinions to “flat-Earthism,” we’re all full of shit.
Maybe not “I believe NASA is a hoax made to sell t-shirts and documentaries” full of shit, but still; don’t get too cocky on your superior critical thinking. Our bullshit is way worse.
Because at least flat-Earthers don’t have a real, negative impact on society as a whole. They are safely isolated in their YouTube channels, forums, and documentaries. Our bullshit, on the other hand, is way more dangerous — because, contrary to the belief that the Earth is flat or that the aliens built the pyramids, ours makes perfect sense.
I’ll give you a prominent example, and you be honest with yourself and wonder whether your common sense would’ve spotted the bullshit on time.
In the 80s, a bullshit opinion deceived entire countries and got millions of people sick
It started when the USA and the UK released its first Dietary Guidelines.
It shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. It promised to be a solution to the rising number of heart disease cases. Steak and butter were replaced with pasta and rice. Saturated fats were condemned in favor of carbohydrate and sugar-rich diets.
Now we know that the idea of saturated fat collapsing our arteries was a bullshit opinion based on biased conclusions and cherry-picked studies. But it was the bullshit opinion of the renowned nutritionist Ancel Keys, who happened to have a lot of institutional power and influence. So people followed the advice and got fatter and sicker than ever.
And it’s not that Keys didn’t have the technology to pursue the truth. Another nutritionist, John Yudkin, had already alerted about the dangers of sugar back in 1972. The problem? It made Ancel Keys’ theory look so bad it would’ve ended his career.
So, since Ancel happened to hold all the cards, he went all Pablo Escobar against Yudkin, using his institutional position to fund studies that supported his theory, and rallying his friends from the food industry to destroy Yudkin’s reputation.
They succeeded. Yudkin died a forgotten man and they kept on selling that sweet white powder to the masses.
We were unprepared to face bullshit then — and we are unprepared now
I blame the lack of literature about it. I mean, if we talk about nutrition as being a “young science” because it’s only a century old, then bullshit is in his rebellious teens now, with the majority of serious works about it published in this century.
Ancel Keys was only defending his interpretation of the truth. One that, if you asked me, made perfect sense.
So, since there is no “How to Win Friends and Not Bullshit People” classic that everybody has read and is aware of, let me tell you the crucial thing you need to know about it: it’s not the same as lying.
To lie — to yourself, or others — first you need to know what the truth is, and then intentionally misguide people in a different direction. In this sense, you cannot lie to yourself. If you know the truth, like “not every person in the world likes me,” you can’t just cover it up under a mantra or cast a hypnotic spell that makes you think otherwise.
What you can do instead is bullshit yourself. Which is not about knowing the truth and going in a different direction, but not knowing the truth and not caring about it.
At first glance, Ancel Keys might give the impression of a narcissistic, twisted Dr. Evil that built a dietary empire based on lies and mischief. But did he know the truth? No, he didn’t. Nobody actually had the ultimate answer — that’s why there was a discussion in the first place.
Ancel Keys was only defending his interpretation of the truth. One that, if you asked me, made perfect sense. “Fat collapses the arteries, not sugar, therefore eating less fats should solve the problem.”
He manipulated data in favor of his beliefs. And when your entire reputation and career as a scientist depend on your version of the truth to be the good one, it’s very easy to dismiss proof that doesn’t support it.
And aren’t we all giving very few shits about the truth lately?
The age of instant gratification, instant deliveries, instant responses, and instant noodles have spoiled us into thinking we’re entitled to instant opinions too.
It’s so cheap to have an opinion these days it’s almost socially punished not to have one. I mean you are just one tweet away. Are you a feminist or not? Do you believe in climate change? Are you a liberal or a conservative? You can’t play referee in this game, pick a side now.
We can’t just opt-out of having opinions; our social lives are as much at stake as Ancel Keys’ scientific reputation.
Do you know what can’t fit in a tweet? Nuance.
And where there is a save on time, there is a shortage of something else. So for every toilet paper roll that flies by in Amazon packages under a 24-hour delivery guarantee, an employee is forced under exploitative performance demands. And for every instant opinion that you make, there will be a cut on the only thing that can be cut from opinions — critical thinking.
But those are uncomfortable truths we prefer to ignore. Because taking the time to get to a more nuanced version of the truth means that we’ll have to answer with a lot of I-don’t-knows and I’m-not-sures in the meantime — and those can’t harvest enough Internet points to satisfy our spoiled brains.
I don’t mean to throw all the blame on us, suggesting a global decay in moral behavior just because we stopped caring. We’re doing what we can to keep up with the overwhelming, ever-increasing stream of information and our need to have opinions about every bit of it.
Because that’s what living in society means: having opinions, finding people with similar opinions, and then acting on them to create what we think is a better whole. We can’t just opt-out of having opinions; our social lives are as much at stake as Ancel Keys’ scientific reputation.
Perhaps the only countermeasure to bullshit is this one
Having fewer opinions.
Not getting rid of them (because that’s silly) but lean into the I-don’t-knows more often. You know, there are people whose jobs require them to account for the curvature of the Earth, such as bridge engineering. The rest of the people don’t actually need to have an opinion about it.
Neither should we be forced to have opinions on real, pressing issues like equality, feminism, racism, and climate change. That is, if we are not committed to spending a long while searching for the truth before we state our opinion, and after that, be open to change our minds instead of clinging to a comfortable illusion.
I came to realize I can’t afford an opinion on those topics. A brief inquiry into feminism made me found out there are different “waves” of it, adding to the confusion. Renewable energies are an obvious thing to support until you realize some celebrated environmentalists condemn solar and wind in favor of nuclear power.
And don’t even get me into politics, because before I even start I should understand why incompetent people get so high up in the ladder. But I don’t know, maybe that’s my own bullshit showing. My point is, these things are confusing, and the bullshit is piling on both sides of the fence.
In our longing for having strong opinions to fit a narrative, to fit an agenda, or to simply fit in, we override the search for truth that would make those opinions valid in the first place.
Concluding: so every wrong opinion is bullshit?
No. We are allowed to be wrong. Environmentalists, nutritionists, and politicians are allowed to be wrong — even we are allowed to talk about issues we have no idea about and get them so wrong that Netflix makes a documentary about how wrong we got them.
Opinions turn into bullshit the moment you decide to disregard the truth when you encounter it. When you decide to save your scientific reputation, to please donors, to rush your conclusions as to have an early voice on a pressing issue. Or worse — when you resolve not to search for the truth in the first place.
Your point of view is not the problem, but clinging to it when challenged by compelling arguments. Your opinions are likely to have too much potential bullshit on them. Embrace honesty instead.
