An Epidemic of Absents 2

Frankfurt is seeing the consequence of the influence of John Dewey and his philosophic tribe on our culture and our kids:

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

…

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/4682-on-bullshit

―Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

For ourselves, our children, our students, our culture, and our world, we need to commit to logic: the art of non-contradictory identification, the art of forming valid, real, objective concepts and propositions.