Could a 40-year-old essay called On Bullshit really explain it all? All that’s been going on for the past eleven years, right up to the present moment?
Pretty much.
I learned about this philosophical mini-treatise in a podcast about manifestos through history, from the Founders to the Unabomber to tech bros and AIDS activists. It was one of many eye-opening, sobering, and outright hilarious moments in the six episodes. (And, full disclosure, I learned about the podcast itself from my son, who composed and produced the music for it.)
I wrote about all of this for Lincoln Square in a piece that begins this way:
We’ll never need to wonder whether the Declaration of Independence – or Project 2025, for that matter – had impact. But what about Occupy Wall Street, the Free Staters, Anonymous, and countless other movements with names we no longer remember?
What makes a manifesto take root, and stick around? If you wrote your own, what would it say? Is there a specific recipe for success? And must violence be part of that recipe?
These are questions at the heart of Dan Taberski’s Manifesto, a six-part Audible podcast released this summer. It sounds like a vague concept, but in fact it’s quite specific. It also sounds esoteric – but once you realize what we’re really talking about here, it’s as grounded and relevant as … well… the Declaration of Independence.
“Many creators have attempted, with mixed results, to make a podcast series for our troubled times. Taberski has delivered a masterclass,” reviewer Chloe Walker wrote. “Manifesto” might be Audible’s best original podcast so far, she said.
The T-word – Trump – is never mentioned, and the mood is often light, even laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to Taberski’s interviewing skills and sense of humor. But the subtext is unavoidable, especially when he judges absurdist manifestos by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Mark Andreesen as “bullshit,” and makes the connection to On Bullshit – a 1986 essay by the late Princeton philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt, published in 2005 as a 4x6-inch, 67-page hardback.
Bullshit, Frankfurt contends, is worse than and different from lying – closer to bluffing than telling a lie, which involves sharp focus and an inescapable concern about truth and values. “A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular,” Frankfurt writes. A bullshitter “is neither on the side of the truth nor the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all … he just picks them out or makes them up to suit his purpose.”
And one more (completely different) thing
I don’t know if this is a towering achievement or an enormous embarrassment, but on Saturday night my husband and I finished our marathon binge of all 19 seasons of Murdoch Mysteries. It’s a Canadian show about a science-minded Toronto detective who invents all manner of futuristic concoctions, methods and devices to solve crimes in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Not to brag, but we are talking about 335 episodes, sometimes as many as two dozen per season. What possessed us to do this? Sheer exhaustion with life on several fronts, and a need each evening to make the simplest, most entertaining choice.
At some point there was essentially no choice but to forge ahead and complete the project. I have to say it was frustrating to be left with a nervewracking cliffhanger on Saturday, the first time we could not immediately move on to the next season and find out what happened. But — sigh? yay? — Season 20 apparently is on the way. (All the seasons and episodes are on Acorn.TV).
I wrote about the delights of Murdoch in a March newsletter on escapism (yes, we’ve been at this for months). The season we just watched, shot in mid-to-late 2025, often featured mischievous plots and asides that echoed the past 18 months of headlines. U.S.-Canada relations have had their bumps and blow-ups over the centuries. The Murdoch-makers have made the most of the recent unpleasantness, with dastardly villains on both sides.
Thoughtful article. - Jean