WORKING WITH CONCEPTS
Connell Fanning, Assumpta O’Kane, and Marija Laugalyte
When confronted by someone in public life like Boris Johnson, most of us may resort instinctively to words like ‘idiot’, ‘liar’, ‘chancer’, ‘entitled’, ‘arrogant’, ‘untrustworthy’, ‘suits himself’, and so on without giving them a second thought.
In using words like these, we unconsciously dismiss him as a credible policy and decision maker. What mostly happens next is that we move on with our lives and nothing changes. Sadly, the result is that Johnson and many others like him hold onto power and continue in their self-serving patterns of behaviour. Further, we have missed an opportunity for our own development as a concept user.
Going back to ourselves, would it make a difference to the collective good of our world if we were to slow down more often and pay attention to what we are thinking (in this case about Boris Johnson) and intentionally use words and concepts that we have worked on to form our opinions.
We suggest that it would.
How we think
If, for example, we use the word ‘bullshitter’ about Boris Johnson as a throwaway word, it will not help us develop our position or ultimately form a judgement about Johnson’s behaviour and what this tells us about his character. However, if we select a concept, like we would select a tool to create a piece of sculpture, would this help us to dig deeper into Johnson’s behaviour?
We can turn to the concept of ‘bullshitter’ as explained by the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in his little book On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005). For him ‘bullshit’ is not lying or bluffing. The essence of ‘bullshit’ is that it is phony: “The bullshitter is faking things.” The indifference to truth is at the core of the bullshitter: “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Since such a person pays no attention to truthfulness at all, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” (Frankfurt, 2005: 46-47, 56, 61). The difference between a ‘liar’ and a ‘bullshitter’ will be apparent. A ‘liar’ is acquainted with the truth and knows that they are not telling the truth. The ‘bullshitter’ is a stranger to truth and lacks the awareness to realise that. Hence the latter is the greater enemy to truthfulness.
That Boris Johnson was bullshitting was patently obvious at the outset during his campaign for headship of the Conservative Party in 2019 and has continued up to today with his dishevelling over Partygate. So when we bring this concept into our own thinking, we see that Johnson has demonstrated that logic and evidence have no place in his life.
Now we have something substantial, a useful and meaningful concept to work with. Do we consider that Boris Johnson is ‘bullshitting’? What do we think when we regard him through the prism of Frankfurt’s concept?
The answer as such is not what we are concerned about here. We are interested in whether we care enough, and are interested enough in public life to ‘stop and think’?
We may well feel that Boris Johnson is a fool and not worthy of our time. But before we take that approach, we will do well to sit with Hannah Arendt for a few minutes and consider her view that the function of the ‘public realm’ is to throw light on the affairs of people by providing a “space of appearances in which [people] can show in word and deed, for better or worse, who they are and what they can do”. However, it seems that Boris Johnson and his like are doing the exact opposite bycorrupting this space in pursuit of their own interests. As Arendt put it, metaphorically:
“…darkness has come when this light is extinguished by ‘credibility gaps’ and ‘invisible government’, by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral or otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truth, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.”
So yes, we have a moral duty to pay attention to our public spaces and the people who hold them. Moreover, from a developmental point of view, we can do really well by training ourselves to pay attention to what is going on around us, using the examples of everyday living to practice how we think. This is hard work which we can only do alone – although the help of a trusted critical friend can help immensely.
The upside to doing our development work is that we are preparing for the times in our lives when we are in the spotlight and are called on to make a judgement, whether of a personal or a professional nature. None of us escape those moments in our lives when we are needed to step up and be the one to make the necessary judgement. Will we be ready?
Personal Developmental Work
Pay attention to our words – Words Matter.
This is important in practice as confusion arises when we are just playing with words. Let us note the points made by John Maynard Keynes and Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about” (Whorf) and “Confusion of thought and feeling leads to confusion of speech” (Keynes).
We can observe and write down the words that we use most often about politicians and ask:
- Are they labels of convenience – lazy thinking?
- Are they labels of substance with underlying concepts that I have thought about?
Then we can ask ourselves:
- How open am I to making a judgement about people like Boris Johnson?
- How prepared am I to make a well-formed opinion on such important matters that have serious consequences for people, society, and organisations?
Assurance: The Keynes Centre does not use any large language pattern statistical models, so called ‘artificial intelligence’ software, in the writing of its articles.
