Bullshit is not a recent invention.
It is difficult to know exactly, when the first instances of it were recorded, but it is safe to say that the phenomenon of bullshit predates the internet by many many years.
In The Red Queen (summary), Ridley details the many ways animals deceive each other. The tricks of deception are played out between the sexes, or between predator and prey. There is something primal about deception, as Dawkins shows in The Selfish Gene (summary).
If deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception, and this ought in turn, to select for self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray by the subtle signs of self-knowledge the deception being practiced.
Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.
In Euthydemus, a Socratic dialogue, Plato complains about the philosophers known as the Sophists, who did not care about what was really true – they were only interested in winning arguments.
The world is awash with bullshit, and we’re drowning in it. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Silicon Valley startups elevate bullshit to high art. Colleges and universities reward bullshit over analytic thought. The majority of administrative activity seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit. We wink back—but in doing so drop our guard and fall for the second-order bullshit they are shoveling at us.
Calling Bullshit, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
Read The Art of Bullshit.