How Men Evolved to Be Bullshitters
Bullshit, self-deception, and war go hand-in-hand, and men have a greater propensity to engage in all three.
Harry Frankfurt once wrote a short, brilliant philosophical book called On Bullshit.
In his thorough analysis of bullshit, Frankfurt distinguishes between liars and bullshitters.
Liars sprinkle lies into a coherent narrative of facts. They tell stories that make plausible sense to the person being lied to. Most of their stories are usually truthful, except for crucial elements they replace with deception to try to make you believe something false. In this sense, liars respect the nature of truth as a concept but choose to lie.
Bullshitters, on the other hand, pay no respect to truth as a concept.
Bullshitters will tell you one thing now and contradict it five minutes later. It doesn’t matter because truth doesn’t matter. Today, they swear they’re on the cusp of landing that high-paying job. Tomorrow they’ve changed their minds, and they’re going to school. The following day, they’ll tell you they’re selling all of their possessions to become a monk.
Bullshitters just say random things and expect you to follow along. They may be incoherent, but, damn, they’re confident in their bullshit—it’s seductive.
The world has never seen a bigger bullshitter than a successful populist politician.
There’s an evolutionary reason for this.
There’s also an evolutionary reason that men evolved to bullshit more than women.*
Disclaimer: This article will be macabre. Violence is a part of our evolutionary history. Proceed if you’re ready for that.
The Dark Ages of Human History
To trace the roots of this difference between the sexes, we need to go back to a time before anatomical humans existed. We’re talking millions and millions of years ago. It was an ugly time to be a pre-human primate, one of our ancestors. It was the dark ages, both in the sense that survival on the plains of Africa was grueling and because we don’t have much evidence to tell us how life was for these almost-human creatures.
Both liars and bullshitters have capitalized on these gaps in the archaeological records to fill them with their own stories. One of the most familiar stories is the Noble Savage myth, the idea that before civilization, everything was peachy among human hunter-gatherers, and it was the invention of civilization that made us violent.
This view is only partially true. It ignores a lot of evidence to the contrary. Yes, many hunter-gatherer tribes were peaceful nomads, but by no means were all of them.
Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers is a book featured in the Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 72, and it’s a comprehensive overview of the history of violence and warfare among hunter-gatherer tribes.
Jebel Sahaba is a prehistoric mass grave that archaeologists call Cemetery 117. It’s in modern-day Sudan.
At 14,000 years old, it’s the oldest-known war cemetery in the world. Sixty-one people have been found at the gravesite so far, and of them, 45% have injuries consistent with prehistoric warfare—spears and arrow wounds, as well as cut marks that were inflicted after death, in some cases.
Not only did organized violence occur before the advent of civilization, but the kind of tribal warfare that would cause the victors to mutilate the bodies of the victims.
And, guess what…
It takes some powerful beliefs to work yourself up into such a frenzy that you mutilate the corpses of your war victims after death.
But what force could whip people up into such a frenzy? What beliefs could they possibly hold that would cause the people of this battle to commit such egregious acts of violence?