The Bullshit Ecology: How Weak Ideas Win and Clear Thinking Gets Treated as a Threat
Core insight:
Bullshit thrives when the social function of a belief outweighs the truth function of that belief.
1. Preconditions for Bullshit’s Rise
Bullshit isn’t random — it’s an adaptive strategy that flourishes when certain conditions are in place.
1. High Identity Load
- When beliefs signal who you are rather than what’s true, accuracy becomes secondary to belonging.
- Saying something true but identity-incongruent is treated as betrayal.
- Saying something false but group-reinforcing is seen as virtue.
2. Epistemic Fragmentation
- Without shared ground truth, groups drift into parallel worlds.
- Each world has its own internal logic, language, and taboos.
- Reality-checking means crossing worlds — and that feels like defection.
3. Performance-Based Selection
- In institutions or media where status comes from performing the right signals, not solving problems:
- Ambiguity can please everyone.
- Clarity risks alienating people or forcing accountability.
2. How Bullshit Outcompetes Clarity
Once these conditions exist, bullshit becomes a highly fit “information species” in the cultural ecosystem.
1. Strategic Ambiguity
- Keeps multiple audiences onside.
- Avoids being proven wrong.
- Allows post-hoc spin.
2. Moral Signalling
- Frames positions as virtue rather than logic.
- Critique looks like an attack on goodness itself.
3. Narrative Conformity
- Aligns with dominant myths and emotionally satisfying story arcs.
- Leverages our preference for story over structure.
4. Hierarchy Protection
- Beliefs that stabilise power get rewarded.
- Truths that threaten status are punished.
3. Why Truth-Tellers Get Suppressed
Truth-tellers are dangerous in these systems — not because they’re wrong, but because they:
- Break the illusion: Pointing out contradictions collapses the shared story.
- Threaten status: Reveals who’s faking competence or authority.
- Cause emotional rupture: Undermine the coping fictions people rely on.
So plain common sense becomes subversive. And truth-tellers are dismissed as rude, arrogant, disloyal, naïve, or even dangerous.
4. The Bullshit Reproduction Cycle
Here’s the loop that keeps it going:
- Identity binds belief → Defection feels like betrayal.
- Fragmentation blocks falsification → No shared reality to test claims.
- Performance rewards ambiguity → Clarity carries penalties.
- Status prizes narrative loyalty → Bullshit gains prestige.
- Truth-tellers disrupt cohesion → They’re punished or ignored.
- Suppression reinforces the illusion → The cycle restarts.
5. The Deep Model
Bullshit thrives in ecologies where:
- Signalling > solving
- Belonging > coherence
- Narrative > mechanism
- Identity > inquiry
And where:
- Truth without tact is seen as a threat
- Emotional comfort outranks structural honesty
- Institutions reward the maintenance of the illusion over the dismantling of it
In these systems, bullshit isn’t just tolerated — it’s selected for.
Clarity isn’t just ignored — it’s treated like a contagion.
When you see bullshit winning, it’s not because truth lost an honest contest.
It’s because the system wasn’t built to reward truth in the first place.
And until the incentive structure changes, those who speak plainly will keep being the “hopeless sinners” in someone else’s world — guilty not of lying, but of breaking the story that holds it together.
“Is there a place for the hopeless sinner, who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs?” — Bob Marley