The life and death dangers of bullshit in food, science and politics

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Details: Parent Category: ROOT; Category: Frontpage Articles; Last Updated: Saturday, 25 April 2020 18:19; Published: Saturday, 25 April 2020 15:58; Written by Mike Sutton; Hits: 3815

Nullius in verba is the motto of the prestigious Royal Society of London. That motto is taken from a longer ancient quote that has it that we should believe nothing on the word alone of any king or guru. In other words, it means, in essence, “show me the evidence”. That said, considering the preceding sentence I suggest you check the veracity of its provenance for yourself. After all, I could be bullshitting in the philosophical sense. The difference between lies and bullshit, according to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his book, On Bullshit, is that the liar cares about the truth of a particular matter, yet intends to deliberately deceive us that falsehoods about it are true facts.

The bullshitter, according to Frankfurt, gives not a jot about what is true and cares only to persuade us – as do many politicians – that their claims are true regardless of their veracity. But what has any of this got to do with what you should care about? Well, starting with food, what if literally knowing the difference between actual bullshit, the philosophical variety of bullshit and truth was a simple matter of life or death the next time you, a stranger, friend, or family member ate a beef burger?

Bullshit matters. Especially to criminology students. For several distinguished criminologists have observed in recent years that crime does not exist (see Christie 2000). Wise scholars such as Nils Christie claim that there are acts and then there is the process of giving these acts meaning (ibid. p.22). Some acts cause outrage in some societies and are criminalised but are tolerated in other societies. So there is probably a lot of bullshit used to justify a claim of criminality in some, perhaps many, cases. That is why we pay lawyers, albeit not much in criminal cases, to argue that the defendant is or is not guilty of something that may or may not be a crime. In such fields of enquiry, distinctions between bullshit and more acceptable versions of ‘the truth’ are rather crucial to the outcomes.

Bad science, such as bite analysis and other flawed so-called "expert scientist" witness testimony has a long history of leading to miscarriages of justice. The role of bad science in deaths, beside wrongful imprisonment and execution, is a weirdly unexplored area in criminology. Have a look at "How an unreliable eyewitness can make you a murderer" and other similar articles on crime science in the New Scientist.

Bullshit kills? Really? “Nullius in Verba” Show me the Evidence!

E-coli is a bacterium, a living organism, that can remain alive, for example, in poorly cooked meat, unpasteurised milk or cheese. The consequence of ingestion by humans has been known many times to prove fatal, and yet few traders who sold contaminated food leading to deaths are ever prosecuted.

Some years ago, at a BBQ in London, I seriously offended my hosts by insisting that the pink beef burger they served my daughter was quite possibly not safe for her or anyone else to eat. The juicy and perfectly charred meat was made from the finest ground steak from their local trusted “posh” butcher, and so they insisted it was perfectly safe to eat. Safe, they argued because it is safe to eat a rare steak – isn’t it? After a heated discussion (pun intended) they finally, grudgingly, accepted that I was right to ban the juicy, charred on the outside yet pink-in-the middle, burger from passing my daughter’s lips.

I was right to tell them that not only are pink burgers unsafe (unless you first thoroughly and effectively sear the entire outside of the steak before grinding it up), they are particularly unsafe for children and should never be served to them. Why is this a fact? Because the carcass of a slaughtered bull is often covered in its faeces, or that of other bulls (literally bullshit), and so it can get onto the meat. And bullshit contains E. coli. Therefore, raw bullshit on the outside equals bullshit on the inside of the meat if you grind it all up together.

Pink burgers, even those containing bullshit, might be safe if the internal pink bit has reached 160 degrees throughout in the cooking process, but it is very hard for anyone to prove to you that it has. For all you know they made a mistake, or they are “bullshitting” After all, where is the verifiable evidence they cooked it properly?

Later in the evening, my hosts humorously turned the conversation to the difficulty I am having in getting the scientific and wider community to understand why it is important that we distinguish between truth and bullshit in the story of the discovery of evolution by natural selection. Yes, they were still speaking to me.

We spoke about the fact people buy and read my book, Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s greatest secret and agree with the newly discovered bombshell evidence in it, but just can’t be bothered to spend so much as 5 minutes of their precious time to write a review on Amazon to help spread the truth. Why, because apparently “who cares about the truth of such matters?” I was further informed: “The trouble with you is that you care too much about the truth.”

That comment got me thinking about the importance of truth even more in the history of the discovery of evolution by natural selection. My book contains the bombshell, new, independently verifiable discovery, that, as opposed to the old supermyth started by Darwin in 1860 that no naturalist, indeed, he later alternately claimed, no one whatsoever, read what both Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace and leading scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Ernst Mayr all later agreed was Patrick Matthew’s (1831) prior published full theory of evolution by natural selection. Many naturalists, and the greatest influencers of Darwin and Wallace, and their influencer’s influencers, had in fact cited Matthew’s book years before either man put pen to paper on the topic of natural selection!

One of these newly discovered citing naturalists is Prideaux John Selby. He was the editor of the journal that published Wallace’s famous Sarawak paper on evolution and a friend of Darwin’s father and Darwin’s great friend Leonard Jenyns, both of whom were his house guests. Another, Robert Chambers, was Wallace’s admitted greatest influencer, also an admitted influencer of Darwin and the man said to have “put evolution in the air” in the first half of the 19^th century with his secretly authored best-selling book The Vestiges of Creation. And all of that happened before Darwin’s and Wallace’s claimed dual miraculous virgin conceptions of Matthew’s original ground-breaking theory.

Matthew originally called it: the ‘natural process of selection’, a unique term, which Darwin supposedly, if you are credulous, miraculously replicated by originally four-word shuffling to ‘process of natural selection’. Darwin had little choice but to steal it. Matthew’s prior discovery being totally a process, of selection, that was natural. Darwin and Wallace were each further bound, miraculously, we are again told to credulously believe by the scientific establishment, to independently conceive and replicate Matthew’s original explanatory analogy of differences between natural and artificial selection for the theory to be understood. Of course, Matthewian knowledge contamination of the brains of his replicators is a far more scientific explanation than multiple dual virgin conception miracles. Wouldn’t you agree?

The newly discovered facts in my book are seemingly equally as unwelcome to the currently stonewalling Royal Society members and those of other so-called “scientific establishment” institutions, as the guest who questions the food hygiene of the dish served them by a beloved and proud host. And yet, the veracious information I give them corrects their errors and doing just that might save both cooks and scientists from killing people.

That they may kill people is no idle exaggeration either, because understanding the real, as opposed to mythical, process by which all ground-breaking scientific discoveries are made may in the current age of Big Data, quantum computing and artificial intelligence over the horizon, improve scientific knowledge about how to increase the rate of making new life-saving discoveries in science. If we do not realise this, we do not realise the lesson of the Bullshit Burger parable: namely, bullshit literally kills in more ways than one!

Do you have time to spread this important message to your fellow humans? Perhaps you do not care enough about the truth to do so and save lives? After all, as my extremely successful and wealthy hosts told me: “Don’t you realise we are living in a post-truth world?”

They know that corporations are frequently profiting from selling palatable bullshit instead of unpalatable truth, just so long as it brings in money. And that is exactly what the Darwin deification industry does. It is very profitable for universities to spread bullshit about Darwin being an original and honest genius, and to add to that the myth of Wallace making a remarkable parallel original discovery. It is very profitable for the publishers who publish it, the authors who write it, and the universities that teach it. For them, money, not uncomfortably embarrassing new discoveries, is the bottom line.

We are living in a pandemic of bullshit

Relatedly, at the time of writing, during the 2020 lethal Covid-19 virus lockdown, the bottom line itself took precedence over facts when the Tory governments scientific adviser and Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries was filmed prior to the lockdown on 11 March 2020 (see the video here) for all eternity advising Prime Minister Boris Johnson that there was no need for the UK to cancel major public gatherings at sporting events etc to save lives during the pandemic even though other countries were sensibly doing so in light of the facts of what happened in China. The telling question is this: ‘Was she lying for the sake of taxable revenue raising from sporting events such as the un-cancelled Cheltenham Festival, or for the same reason bullshitting when she so confidently, in the true in-group signaling colours of a typical managerialist, sought to persuade him and us when she said: “We’ve looked at what sorts of interventions might help manage this as we go forward. And in general, those sorts of events and big gatherings are not seen to be something which will have a big effect. So, we don’t want to disrupt people’s lives.” Most importantly, how many lives were lost as a result of such palpable “expert” muddle-headed nonsense spouted by Harries and swallowed by Johnson? Moreover, Johnson boasted of shaking hands with hospital patients, despite the known risks, and was soon after admitted to intensive care with Covid19. At the time of writing he remains in convalescence and out of action weeks after falling very seriously ill.

Letting so called “experts” and scholars get away with publishing fallacies and myths signals to others the existence of topics where guardians of good scholarship might be less capable than elsewhere, namely, bullshit production and dissemination. Perhaps such dysology then serves as an allurement to poor scholars and deceitful others to disseminate existing myths and fallacies and to create, publish and in other ways disseminate their own in these topic areas, which leads to a downward spiral of diminishing veracity on topics? I think so. This is the dysology hypothesis. Dysology? Look it up. Don’t let me lead you on.

We are living in an increasingly post-truth age. Our corporate managerialist-led universities are prioritising bottom-line chasing-grants capture to study almost anything so long as it brings in money over unfunded research that can make bombshell discoveries that embarrass the scientific establishment or the government. Such essentially anti-academic corporate shallowness places lives at risk. Many lives. Perhaps millions of lives.

We know lies and bullshit kill, but the telling question is this: ‘Is it probable that inept and vacuous,buzz-term signaling managerialists, by failing to care about their own lies or bullshit, and that of others they facilitate, are actually the biggest killer of all?’

References

Nils Christie (2000) Crime Control as Industry. London: Routledge.

Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton UP or Blackwell UK.

Mike Sutton is an author, General Editor of the Internet Journal of Criminology and was Reader in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University, prior to retirement in 2018.

This blog post is based on several prior online publications by Mike Sutton on the topic of lies, managerialism, the danger of real and philosophical ‘bullshit’, and what he calls dysology. See PatrickMatthew.Com, Supermyths.com, Dysology.com or his output on Twitter under @Criminotweet