The importance of caring about the truth

What’s the harm in a little white lie? What’s the harm in telling a story that’s more compelling, entertaining, or convincing than the actual truth? What’s the harm in exaggeration or hyperbole, or in attempting to persuade others of a position that’s contrary to reality?

Most of us do these things all the time, often for our own personal gain or to reduce our potential liability. We lie to our loved ones about our activities, seeking to not get into trouble for our actions. We discount robust, fact-based evidence that contradicts our preferred narratives and conclusions, while elevating and emphasizing stories that may not be true but that agree with our preconceptions. And if we’re seeking attention, empathy, the adulation of others, or to stir up strong feelings in our audience, we might make statements designed to arouse precisely those responses, without any regard for whether what we’re stating is truthful or not.

We often think that the opposite of the truth is a lie, but that’s not quite right. Instead, the opposite of being wedded to a fact-based, evidence-based reality, where the truth is of paramount importance, is instead a stream of what recently-deceased philosopher Harry Frankfurt would simply call bullshit. Claims like:

and much, much more may all be untrue, but can be weaponized in very different ways by liars compared with bullshitters. Once we abandon caring about the truth — exactly what the proponents of a post-truth world would desire — we abandon the ability to think and reason critically. Yet that’s exactly what’s needed now, more than ever.

Above, you can find a clip of Harry Frankfurt discussing the concept of what he called bullshit, which was the topic of his most famous and influential essay and book. While the majority of us might think that lies — deliberately crafted and with the intent to deceive — are the polar opposite of the truth, the reality is that those who tell the truth and those who tell lies are both focused on the same thing: what’s actually true.

The truth-teller wants to present the truth as accurately and factually correctly as possible, hoping that, by telling the truth, they’ll convince others of the truth as well. The truth-teller’s tacit assumption is that the truth, simply on its own merits of being the truth, is what everyone in the audience desires to possess. If you’re someone who’s interested in the truth, then telling the truth is of paramount importance, despite the deficiencies of the truthful position: it’s often complicated, nuanced, and requires a large amount of critical thought to comprehend properly.

The liar wants to keep the truth from people at all costs: by presenting a more attractive but counterfactual narrative that’s designed to steer people away from the truth. Liars will often employ a number of unscrupulous tactics — vilifying the truth-tellers, presenting easy-to-repeat but laborious-to-debunk alternative tales to the truth, putting forth a conspiracy, etc. — to convince people to believe in non-truthful alternatives.

Despite a variety of conspiratorial claims to the contrary, 5G cell towers, which this previous 4G tower in Orem, Utah, was being upgraded to at the time this 2021 photo was taken, pose no danger to human or animal health. In particular, they do not cause cancer, mind control, or spread COVID-19. A few years ago, this (now-obvious) conspiracy theory was taken seriously by millions of advocates across the planet, and no doubt the next upgrade, to the 6G standard, will bring about the same fundamentally anti-science claims.

But both the liar and the truth-teller are interested in the truth, and are interested in whether the people they’re addressing believe or disbelieve the truth. They are two combatants on the opposite ends of the spectrum, with one side advocating for an evidence-based reality and the other arguing against it. At various times, many of us might find ourselves recognizing that we may have chosen a side incorrectly, and then we have to face an uncomfortable reckoning:

• either we gather more facts and value the truth, and make our best attempts to come down on whichever side appears to better represent the actual truth,
• or we gather whatever arguments we can to justify our pre-existing position, digging ourselves into deeper alignment with those who already agree with us, convincing ourselves along the way that whatever we believe must be the actual truth.

However, there’s another alternative pathway: that of bullshit. When it comes to bullshit, there’s no regard for the truth at all. Whether something is true or not plays no role at all in the mind (or the mouth) of the bullshitter; all that matters is whether the statements they can make suit their purposes or not. The bullshitter doesn’t care about whether something is the truth, a lie, or even internally inconsistent; it does not matter if what they say is useful or useless, significant or insignificant, or sensical or utter nonsense. It requires no knowledge of, or regard for, the actual truth.

Traditional power plants, based on the combustion reactions of fossil fuels, such as the Dave Johnson coal-fired power plant shown here in Wyoming, can generate tremendous quantities of energy, but require the burning of an enormous quantity of fuel in order to do so. The ash produced by this burning sends large quantities of particulate ash into the atmosphere, where it will eventually settle into the soil and onto the ocean bottoms, where it may become incorporated into materials found in the same location, while simultaneously adding long-buried carbon molecules back into Earth’s atmosphere.

What Frankfurt noted, remarkably, is that those who peddle bullshit (the bullshitters) along with those who normalize the acceptance of bullshit in our discourse (instead of focusing on the truth) are actually more harmful to society, as a whole, than liars and the behavior of lying itself. The reason for this, as Frankfurt argues, is because liars are still actively concerned with the truth, even as they themselves act to conceal, obfuscate, or hide it from their audience. A liar or lies themselves can be combated — albeit laboriously — with a full explanation of the truth, as those who properly engage in critical thinking will eventually, after informing themselves properly, have the potential to discern the actual truth for themselves.

But for the bullshitter, there is no regard for truth at all. It doesn’t matter what the truth is because the bullshitter is only interested in participating in the conversation and providing an opinion; whether that opinion is informed, knowledgeable, fact-based, includes relevant research, or even coherent is not relevant to the bullshitter. All that matters is whether the bullshitter appears adequately opinionated, and this act of opinion-giving is performed with a disregard for and utter lack of carefulness with the truth. The more that bullshit is accepted and normalized, the more acceptable it becomes for everyone to ignore the truth.

Vaccines, including the measles and HPV vaccines, are very safe, and most people don’t have any problems or side effects. Studies have shown that vaccines cause the rates of illness and infection to decline precipitously, with the HPV vaccine leading to a 64 percent reduction in HPV rates among teenaged girls ages 14 to 19, and 34 percent among women ages 20 to 24. Yet vaccination rates remain low for HPV and many other preventable diseases, causing thousands of unnecessary illnesses and ill effects.

We see this practically omnipresently here on planet Earth in 2025. There are issues where the truth is known very solidly:

• on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, particularly in their ability to prevent infectious diseases like measles,
• on the benefits of basic science to society, such as NASA, NSF, and NIH-funded science,
• on the science of the cause of global warming and climate change, plus how to mitigate it,
• and on the high cost, both monetarily and in terms of human lives, of succumbing to misinformation,

and yet a great many of us choose to ignore even the issue of whether something is truthful or not, instead preferring to continue onward with whatever agrees with our ideological preferences. As Frankfurt himself clearly noted:

“Respect for the truth and a concern for the truth are among the foundations for civilization. I was for a long time disturbed by the lack of respect for the truth that I observed… bullshit is one of the deformities of these values.”

Oftentimes, lies and bullshit overlap and go hand-in-hand, as opposition to the truth and to truth-tellers can be seen as a litmus test for loyalty. If you’re willing to forego the truth in order to fall into agreement with either a bullshitter or a liar, that’s a clear indication of loyalty to them: over and above your loyalty to principles like truth, honestly, or fact-based/evidence-based reality.

In 2019, with Hurricane Dorian bearing down on the Florida coast, the official NOAA predictions (in white) were edited with a sharpie to incorrectly align with previous Donald Trump statements (that were factually inaccurate) about the potential path of the hurricane to include portions of Alabama, which was never at risk. It was an amazing “test” of whether loyalty to the truth or to a particular individual was more important.

If we all believed in seeking the truth, and valued those principles — truth, honesty, a fact-based and evidence-based view of reality, etc. — we would respond to the discovery of both lies and bullshit similarly. Any untruth that somehow influenced or became policy would be:

• exposed for the untruth that it is,
• replaced by the most truthful narrative possible in the public square and in the public consciousness,
• and policies would change to better align with a reality-based worldview,
• ensuring that civilized society followed the most optimal path, to the degree that our understanding of reality represents the actual reality we all share.

However, what we’re seeing today, particularly in the United States here in 2025, is the exact opposite of that. The government institutions that we rely on to tell the objective truth about reality, including:

• the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
• the Centers for Disease Control (CDC),
• the National Science Foundation (NSF),
• the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
• the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),
• the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM),
• the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),

are being gutted in the bullshittiest way possible. Funding is being frozen for already approved and appropriated projects; meritorious scientists who are conducting scrupulous science in service of the public good are being fired without cause; scientific truths and avenues that communicate them are being censored; entire websites that tell the truth about scientific issues are being deleted and replaced with pure bullshit-heavy propaganda.

In April of 2025, the US Government completely removed all of the content from the government’s COVID-19 website, covid.gov, and replaced it with a website that promotes an agenda that is completely ignorant of and in conflict with the actual scientific evidence.

Many, for justifiable reasons, despair at what’s occurring here in 2025. We live in a time when there exists so much human knowledge that rejecting it in favor of (what’s obviously) bullshit seems unconscionable, and there appears to be no clear path back toward a truth-focused reality. And yet, the first step toward solving any problem is always the same: recognizing what the actual problem is. For that, there’s no better source than Harry Frankfurt himself, and so I’ve chosen to manually transcribe the video shown atop this article so that you can follow along with precisely what he himself has to say about it.

“People should care about the truth because the truth is the truth about how things are. And it’s important for us to recognize how things are, and not to pretend that it’s something else. If you have the truth you know what reality is like; if you don’t, you’re ignorant of reality. There’s a lot of activity in which the truth is not particularly respected: in which its importance is actively denied.

We are living in an age where there’s another alternative to the truth, and that’s bullshit. The reason why there’s so much bullshit, I think, is that people just talk. If they don’t talk, they don’t get paid. The advertiser wants to gain sales; the politician wants to gain votes. Now, that’s okay, but they have to talk about things they don’t really know much about. So, since they don’t have anything really valid to say, they just say whatever they think will interest the audience or make it appear that they know what they’re talking about, and what comes out is bullshit.

This graph shows the global average temperature anomalies relative to the 1850-1900 baseline. The red line shows the multi-year moving average of global temperature, while the dotted green line shows a linear fit to the warming from 1974-2022. As recent years show, the warming trend has accelerated, with 2023 and 2024 marking severe (hottest-ever) departures from the late-20th century trend.

The bullshitter is more creative; he’s not submissive. It’s not important to him what the world really is like. What’s important to him is how he would like to represent himself. He takes a more adventurous and inventive attitude towards reality, which may be sometimes very colorful and sometimes amusing. Sometimes it might produce results that are enjoyable. But it’s also very dangerous.

Liars attempt to conceal the truth by substituting something for the truth that isn’t true. Bullshit is not a matter of trying to conceal the truth; it’s a matter of trying to manipulate the listener. And if the truth will do, then that’s fine, and if the truth won’t do, then that’s also fine. So the bullshitter is indifferent to the truth in a way in which the liar is not. He’s playing a different game.

Another reason why I think bullshit is a more insidious opponent, or threat, to the truth is that it’s less identifiable. I mean the lie makes a specific move, and it can be uncovered or revealed. Bullshit is vague; it doesn’t… you can’t put your finger on it. What’s wrong with it? What is going on? Why is it objectionable? Politicians lie and bullshit constantly. When they’re caught in a lie, there’s a great commotion. There’s no corresponding response to bullshit. There’s no ‘finding it out.’ There’s no uncovering it. Insofar as bullshit is accepted, insofar as it’s regarded as normal, I think it tends to undermine the respect for truth.

The central idea of the lab leak hypothesis, that the virus spilled over from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is only possible if the virus from which SARS-CoV-2 originated was actually ever inside the institute itself. If the virus originated naturally, with parts of it found in animals that were located in a wild population in Laos, which genetic sequencing uncovered in 2021 indicates, the lab leak hypothesis is ruled out as a possibility. You cannot create something through gain-of-function research that will have an identical genetic code to something that came about in the wild through natural processes such as recombination.

It has become the norm to a considerable extent. In my country at any rate, something like 99.8% of the qualified scientists in the world tell us that we’re having a serious effect on the climate. That’s an established scientific fact; I don’t think there could be any question about it. But a lot of politicians deny it. They just say, ‘it’s not true,’ ‘it’s lies,’ ‘it’s an attempt on the part of tree huggers to prevent economic development.’ It’s just bullshit. It comes close to being a lie, but I think a lot of politicians don’t know enough about the science to know that it is a lie, they just assume it must be a lie because it doesn’t fit into their political or economic agenda.

The assertion that something has been established, scientifically, no longer carries the same weight that it used to carry. So that’s the danger: that there will be a loss of concern for the truth. And that, I think, is an insidious assault on one of the fundamental principles of society.

If you have the truth you know what reality is like; if you don’t, you’re ignorant of reality. And I don’t know whether it’s important to explain why reality is important. We live in the real world. We depend upon it. We need it. We need to know about it. We need to be able to find our way around in it. And if we don’t have the truth, then we can’t do those things.

In February of 2025, noted anti-vaccine, anti-fluoride, and anti-GMO crusader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., despite the objection of qualified scientists and medical professionals, was sworn in as the director of Health and Human Services in the United States.

We don’t really need bullshit. In fact, bullshit, I find very offensive. It’s insulting. It is offered to me as though it were an attempt to convey the truth but it’s not. It’s a substitute for the truth, and I don’t want substitutes, I want the real thing, as I think all of us should, all of us must. That’s why we should be on our guard against it and resist it and reject it, wherever we find it.

I think a world without bullshit would be more interesting. It would be a world in which we would lack the creative flair of the bullshitter but in which we would have the fascination and the wonderment of reality. And in that way, I think the world would be much better off.”

The wonderful thing about this moment, right now, is that we have the extraordinary opportunity to recognize and reject the world of bullshit, and the world of lies and liars along with it. Reality, after all, is the one objectively true thing that we all share with one another: from the realities of our lives to the world to the entire Universe, along with everything in it. Instead of listening to voices that already agree with us or whose views are most palatable to our own tastes, we should be asking the one and only question that matters in all endeavors of our lives: what is true? If we focus on that, and listen to the answers we arrive at by observing the natural world itself, we’ll finally defeat the art of the bullshitter, once and for all.