Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I’ve said that many current political movement and party leaders aren’t liars, what do I mean?

Well, they don’t lie, per se.

They bullshit. Which, frankly, is worse.

A successful liar must construct a lie carefully, and must first know the truth. Because the lie must be different from the truth, meant to conceal it. To lie successfully is to distinguish reality from fiction and attempt to convince the other person that one is the other, but always knowing yourself which is actually correct. The facts matter to the liar.

But these people do not do that. They bullshit. In order to further their goals, any actions and any words are permissible, because they see themselves as inherently good (and that goes for narrative and reality). In order to gain an advantage in the immediate “now”, anything can be said. To them, it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or lie, as long as it serves their purpose right now. They craft a situation, a story, narrative, a reality, in which they convince The Other (and even their own) that they are right and good. You see, they must always be right because they are good. The narrative itself need not be consistent or even coherent.

Think of the hundreds of bizarre conspiracy theories in which they are the secret heroes opposing evil. Pizzagate, Satanists, autism vaccines, Qanon, baby-eating liberals, flat Earthers, you name it. Those aren’t lies in the traditional sense of the word. Those are a constant, desperate struggle to be the Good side at all times in spite of evidence to the contrary, and without concerns about what is real and what isn’t. Unlike with lying, the facts, truth, and objective reality don’t matter here. They can be substituted and changed on a whim - the infamous “alternative facts.” That is what bullshitting is.

Debating real-life issues with them becomes futile because their reality is completely fluid and can change in an instant. One day an “engineered bio-weapon Chinese death virus funded by the Clinton Foundation” is going to kill us all, and the next day it’s just a harmless flu. Not because if anything they learned, but because of how it makes them feel, and as I’ve said again and again since age 14, feelings are the enemy of logic.

But if it suits their immediate needs, then something like COVID is a Chinese-Clinton-Gates bioweapon again. And if they don’t feel like wearing a mask in the store, it’s just a flu again. Or it could be a hoax and Fauci made it up. Doesn’t matter as long as the bullshit helps them in the immediate situation. Maybe they believe it, maybe they don’t. They can even apply a form of doublethink to believe two or more contradicting realities simultaneously.

Disregard objective reality, absorb only the reality you choose to take in. One moment Democrats / Liberals / “The Elite” (but only the ones they don’t like) run a global vampiric cabal that rules the world from the shadows in humanity’s single greatest feat of secrecy, and the next moment they’re bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoelaces, unfit to govern anything.

Climate scientists are making billions by convincing people that climate change is real, and at the same time are a bunch of poor hippie losers stuck in a dead end university job. And those stats that you can measure yourself? Uhhh… SHUT UP! WHY’S THERE STILL SNOW THEN, SMART GUY?! Biden is a weak coward bending over for anything Putin says, and simultaneously a warmonger who’s destroying good relationships with Russia and starting WWIII.

Jan. 6 protesters in jail are good, innocent people who are victims of a witch hunt, because Jan. 6 were just peaceful tourists. And they were also violent BLM actors performing a false flag operation. The fact that those rioters filmed and so outed themselves is not in their advantage to say because it goes against the narrative, and so it doesn’t enter that reality.

A liar wouldn’t get away with such internal inconsistencies in their crafted alternate reality. They would immediately be found out, and they would be a terrible liar because a lie needs that internal consistency to be believable. But with bullshitting, the concept of truth never even played a part in it from the very beginning. Bullshitters don’t care if you believe them or not. Their reality is whatever they want it to be at any given time. They are no longer part of “consensus reality”, that which everyone can show, see, and test to be objectively true. And being detached from consensus reality is an extremely dangerous position to be in for further radicalization. They become unable to distinguish fact from fiction anymore, and can eventually turn their imaginary beliefs into real actions. Like shooting up the Pizzagate place. Bombing abortion clinics. Breaking into Pelosi’s home and assaulting her husband with a hammer. Trying to kidnap a governor.

Those people you saw in the news had already left consensus reality long ago, and they were without a doubt True Believers in whatever new reality they found themselves in.

Whether they created that new reality themselves or whether it was pre-made and spoon-fed to them is another matter.