How much of a society's culture can be composed of bullshit, before that society is no longer able to function?
Bullshit serves a purpose. It has many applications, but they all amount to variations of the same thing.
Bullshit is made of language: mostly spoken and written, but any language, including visual and musical language, can contain bullshit.
Language is used to transmit messages. But, as any literary critic can tell you, language has both text and subtext. The text is concrete. But text (or its equivalent, utterance), is mere noise, until it is interpreted by a system which understands it.
Understanding is the crux of meaning. And in practice, "understanding" is subjective and even speculative. What matters more is the observable consequence of processing a message. The "meaning" is how a recipient—a person or machine—responds, not what they claim to understand.
Knowledge is significant only insofar as it alters the knower's behaviour. Doing is all that matters, in reality.
But humans have imagination. Imagination is a waystation on the road between learning and applying knowledge. It is a halfway zone of experimentation. The imagination is where bullshit lives. Because the imagination relies on a model of reality—physical and social—which is not, and cannot, be complete.
Our imagination is especially limited in its ability to describe the social world. Society is made of people, each of whom has their own imagination. Everyone is trying to predict the behaviour of everyone else. But it is impossible to simulate another person's imagination, except in a drastically simplified form.
To simulate dozens, hundreds, millions, or billions of people's own imaginations, all of which are attempting the same thing, is hopeless. The result is that we need bullshit to stand in for such a simulation. We need to substitute a real simulation with an approximation that is so simplified that it is certainly useless. But we have no choice, other than to admit that predicting others' behaviour is virtually impossible, and pointless.
Perhaps some people can achieve this degree of honesty and clarity. But in general, we think—believe—that we know how people will behave, in response to messages, including their interpretations of actual events. Even though we are usually wrong.
The point is that we are partly predicting and acting machines. We need confidence, however unwarranted, in our predictions, in order to stop simulating, and switch over into action.
Bullshit stands in for the unknowable.
Unfortunately, it has increasingly stood in for the knowable, and even the known.
But then again, it is a matter of perspective. What is knowable to one person is not necessarily knowable to another. A fact does not live in isolation—not when it comes to predictions.
Facts only exist relative to the simulation framework used to apply them. An engineer can use a structural drawing of a building to decide whether a certain amount of snow would cause a roof to collapse. A person who cannot read or interpret a structural drawing cannot use that fact—an amount of snowfall—in any useful way.
Most generally, an English speaker cannot read a message in Farsi. But then, such a message would not be bullshit, but simply noise.
Bullshit is information that can be parsed. It is not mere noise, but it does not actually help simulate any part of the world. It does not help to predict the consequences of an action or event. It might change the prediction, but it does not make it more accurate.
People (and other organisms) get some of what we want from the physical environment directly. But eusocial animals get some of what they need from other members of their social group. And they do this by sending messages, in an attempt to manipulate others' behaviour.
Most humans now rely almost completely on one another to provide for their needs. Some people are closer to the source of provision: farmers, builders, textile makers, doctors. But most of us rely on our ability to negotiate provisions from those who make them—or in reality, one or two steps removed from them. We mostly deal with intermediates. And we use language to do our dealings.
Money is a kind of language. It works in a system that emulates the physical world. The system imposes rules of conservation: the same money cannot exist in two places at once; money cannot be created or destroyed; etc.
Of course, money is an invention—a construct—and so money is created and destroyed all the time. Like all cultural rules, the rules governing the creation and destruction of money can be ignored by some people, some of the time. And money can exist in two places at once, if you have a clever accountant.
Because we all rely on language and messages to acquire what we need, and because all these messages are used to run simulations in our imaginations, and most of our imagination is actually running on buillshit to predict how people will react, we have learned to bullshit one another on a perpetual basis.
In practice, this mostly amounts to promises of future behaviour. That is the nature of debt, and all society runs on debt and promises. Most debts are not even monetary. Most debts are implied by our role in society, and our relationships to others.
Society becomes fragile when people make promises that they cannot, or will not, fulfill. The more of those promises pile up, the more those promises are broken, the less we can trust one another, the less we can rely on one another, the more we likely we are to lie to and bullshit one another, and ultimately to betray one another.
But even worse is when all trust is gone, and we cannot even make promises anymore, because no one wlll believe us. Then we cannot hire people to do jobs, in fear that they will simply take our money and run. And we cannot rely on the authorities to enforce contracts, or to pay reparations, because the authorities are also untrustworthy.
How much bullshit is too much bullshit? And how do we prevent a bullshit explosion, and a total collapse of social trust?