Even though he wrote it many years ago, an essay that is getting a lot of play right now is “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University. First five lines:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.
Without having the benefit of his tome, a few years ago I wrote an essay called “TRUT: The Star, The Globe, and the Missing H in the New Veracity“. In it, I basically describe a variant of this familiar “bullshit” phenomenon and I coined a new word for it: trut.
Trut defined:
Trut is the mutable concoction of facts employed for an ulterior purpose. Trut consists of exactly 4/5 of the stuff of truth. Four out of five letters lined up as a reasonable facsimile of truth.
Here at the end of the millennium, consumers of communications are adept at trading in these fractional representations of the truth. Everyone prepares particular versions of the truth for different people. We all in turn take everyone else’s trut and calibrate it to our own understandings. The missing H doesn’t bother us a bit. With 4/5 of the truth and some sense, people manage to get along.
Kind of sounds like a load of bullshit, doesn’t it?