Bullshit is what comes out of the mouth of someone who values persuasion over truth. [...] The people with a need to obscure the truth are those with a political or social agenda.
Almost all humans, in almost all contexts, value persuasion over truth and have a social agenda. Condemning all human behavior that is not truth-seeking is condemning almost all human behavior. This is a strong (normative? prescriptive? judgmental?) claim that should be motivated, but you seem to take it for given.
Persuasion is a natural and desirable behavior in a social, cooperative species that is also competitive on the individual level. The main alternative to persuasion is force, and in most cases I’m glad people use persuasion rather than force. Truth-seeking would also fare worse in a more violent world, because truth has some persuasion value but little violence-value.
Truth is instrumentally useful to persuasion inasfar as people are able to identify truth and inclined to prefer it. I’m all for increasing these two characteristics and otherwise “raising the sanity waterline”. But that is very far from a blanket condemnation of “valuing persuasion over truth”.
Almost all humans, in almost all contexts, value persuasion over truth and have a social agenda. Condemning all human behavior that is not truth-seeking is condemning almost all human behavior. This is a strong (normative? prescriptive? judgmental?) claim that should be motivated, but you seem to take it for given.
Persuasion is a natural and desirable behavior in a social, cooperative species that is also competitive on the individual level. The main alternative to persuasion is force, and in most cases I’m glad people use persuasion rather than force. Truth-seeking would also fare worse in a more violent world, because truth has some persuasion value but little violence-value.
Truth is instrumentally useful to persuasion inasfar as people are able to identify truth and inclined to prefer it. I’m all for increasing these two characteristics and otherwise “raising the sanity waterline”. But that is very far from a blanket condemnation of “valuing persuasion over truth”.