A theory of the bullshitting class
Through written history, all societies except the most primitive have largely consisted of three classes: Warriors, workers and bullshitters. Yes, I know, in historical accounts the bullshitters are not called bullshitters, but priests. But calling them so could lead us to the false belief that they somehow disappeared before the 20th century. They didn't: instead they multiplied.
Being a bullshitter mostly was a comparatively soft job. You don't need to soil your hands. During times of social stability, you also don't need to risk your life more than other people. In an evolutionary sense, it must be the best job ever. Predictably, it is a very sought-after job. Many of us have an instinct that tells us that talking so well that people want to listen to it is the highest of achievements.
For a very long time, the bullshitters were actually supposed to bullshit. That was their job. They could claim that the sun and the moon were brothers, that the rains wouldn't come without human sacrifice or whatever. The point was to create a narrative that kept people together: The workers loyal enough to the warriors. The warriors loyal to each other. The societies created around the most cohesive bullshit tended to win the wars.
In the competition between groups, social cohesion was what really mattered. For most of history, there was not much technology around anyway. Duller talk that made any real sense had few chances against bullshit that decreased infighting and allowed bigger armies to be formed.
Bullshit 2.0
By time, demands on societies increased as competition hardened. Societies built on some kinds of bullshit obviously did better in certain environments than those built on other kinds of bullshit: Enter monotheism. Bullshit about one god that everyone had to follow and obey was more effective in keeping people together than a myriad of gods to choose from. Both Peter Turchin and Joseph Henrich describe this phenomenon: In the Iron Age, agricultural societies were hard-pressed by surrounding herding societies. The answer became to strengthen internal cohesion: increase equality, promote bullshit about one single god who severely punished those who didn't obey him. Bullshitting the wrong way became the worst of crimes, because that could divide people and make society vulnerable to attack.
After Christianity won ground, Europeans spent a millennium or more arguing about what bullshit was the best bullshit. In hindsight, it worked out really well. With a few setbacks, Europe became strong enough to allow something amazing: Public talk that actually made sense.
Words with meaning
It started out slowly. With complex enough societies, people sometimes not only needed to act in synchrony in times of war. They also needed to work together once in a while. Societies that made people actually build a boat together got the colonies, while those that could only bullshit about boats got no colonies. That way, cultural selection favored societies that could allow some talk that made sense too.
It was no easy process. In 16th century Europe, people who could build ships and cathedrals were greatly appreciated. People who studied the stars and planets were not-so-appreciated, as Galileo Galilei discovered. Talk that made sense in relation to the physical world needed to coexist with talk that made sense in relation to the social world. That's how it was in the 16th century, and that's how it still is.
What has changed since the 16th century is the discovery of the utter usefulness of talk that actually makes sense. It not only builds ships and houses. It cures diseases, produces an abundance of food, makes people adopt contraception that ends the Malthusian curse, and, most important of all, it creates weapons so ridiculously efficient that people don't even need to be willing to die for their bullshitting group anymore: Around and within the Western World there are groups that are ten times more united around their bullshit than we Westerners are. But since their bullshit doesn't make sense they can't build weapons that can hurt us very much anyway.
Do we win over bullshit?
So finally, bullshitting was supposed to give way to talk about reality. Institutions were built to promote not bullshitting, but science, journalism and sincere philosophical inquiry. By the 20th century, most people knew very well the importance of keeping bullshitters away from the nice jobs in science: A bullshitting nation that failed to make a nuclear bomb could be a dead nation.
Also less dramatic things are at stake: The eradication of diseases. Efficient production. The solution to hereditary poverty. We really, really don't want all the talking jobs to be filled with bullshitters.
How are we doing? Overall, not very well. The market economy makes a few things happen. In for-profit companies, people know that if they bullshit all day long, nothing will get produced and competitors who bullshit less will take over. While bullshit definitely exists in the corporate world, it can't take it over completely.
An evolutionary process
In the publicly financed sector, there are fewer incentives not to bullshit. Those who pay for research need to figure out how to distinguish between cheap bullshit and talk about the world as such. That task is incredibly hard. Not even the bullshitters themselves know that they bullshit most times. What would be in it for them, knowing that? They think they are saying important things, because people listen/they get paid for it/other bullshitters taught them that saying those things is important.
Most importantly, bullshit has one big advantage over talk that makes sense: It sounds better. Since bullshit doesn't need to adapt to the physical world around, it can focus one hundred percent on adapting to the human mind, in every place and every time. That gives it a huge evolutionary advantage. Bullshit can be as simple as the human mind prefers it to be, while talk about reality needs to do some justice to reality.
Moreover, bullshit is rather cheap to produce. It most of all takes linguistic and social skills. Those are a lot more common than the elusive ability to produce small but groundbreaking thoughts. People able to do the latter are often able to do other things too. Holding high-paying jobs, for example, or leading lives that gives them more freedom than most research positions do. You simply get a bullshitter a lot cheaper than someone who actually thinks. A few people who actually think respect academia so much that they accept low pay, insecurity and mediocre prospects for the opportunity to do what society means people like them to do. But most of the positions will be filled with bullshitters who (rightly) think they got a fairly good deal.
There will be war!
Good deals are scarce in this world. Those who find them have to protect them. So academic bullshitters need to act together, defending their privileges. It is feudalism in our time: When people get positions that are better than anything the market can offer, war comes naturally. Selling illegal drugs to people might seem like a soft job, except that "competition" means you sooner or later get a bullet in your head. Bullshitting for money might seem like a soft job, except that you need to figure out how to get over the walls insiders built to protect their positions. When, or if, you figure that out, you need to watch your back very carefully, because there are many competitors who want to kick you out to where you came from: What was normal bullshit yesterday will get you canceled today.
This is true of the academic world and it is true about the mass media: jobs there are just too good to leave to someone who is not my friend. And why not, my friend can do it! They can bullshit too, don't you see? So why not hire them?
That way, bullshitting institutions become social clubs, there to serve those who managed to get to the inside. Getting in was hard, mind you, so those on the inside are convinced they deserve their positions. Now they are there to make sure that only deserving people get in and stay inside.
Taught to bullshit
In theory, our society is very eager to detect the difference between bullshit and scientific progress. People really don't want the whole research budget to be spent on bullshit.
Nonetheless, the same society actively teaches bullshitting. One of the most common writing tasks for fifteen-year-olds over the Western World goes like this: "Bullshit at least two pages about a subject you know next to nothing about (and if you refuse, there's a McJob waiting for you)". Teenagers who lack both knowledge and experience of violence, racism, poverty, abortion or political extremism are required to bullshit a certain amount about it. Everybody knows the students write and talk bullshit. The idea is that they should first learn to use language and argumentation techniques. Then, at 25, they are supposed to use those skills to say something that actually makes sense.
Inevitably, they also learn about the value of bullshitting. School very strongly teaches that bullshitting is a virtue. At 25, people are supposed to have grown up to be ashamed of bullshitting when they are supposed to do research or journalism. But by then they have been taught by school so many times that writing things that don't make sense is a virtue, so good luck with the reprogramming.
Am I just bullshitting you?
Bullshit both sounds better and is cheaper than talk about the world that makes any sense. So most things said in public are bullshit. The principle of charity should not mean "assume everything people say makes sense until proven otherwise". Because statistically, most things people say don't make any sense at all. Most often, it only sounds good. Instead, the principle of charity should mean: Always interpret what you think people really intend to say, not what you like to argue against.
My theory of the bullshitting class takes us to the inevitable, and (for me) awkward question: If I am right, I am probably bullshitting at this very moment.
How do I get out of this precarious situation? I simply don't. In the defence against the bullshitting class, most people have their own (mostly highly imperfect) bullshit detectors. I can only hope to pass yours.
So, having been looking this post over a few times and discussing it offline for the past several days, I've come to believe that the central theme really is not correct - it doesn't pass my bullshit detector. For one thing, it exists in a state of tension with your post on ideas:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-order-of-thoughts
Either ideas are mostly bullshit, or they are mostly useful; I believe they are mostly useful, not mostly bullshit.
Now I can see a way to resolve the tension between these two positions: bullshit and ideas need to be two different things. Maybe we can agree that bullshit is primarily lies, while ideas are genuinely held. Or, maybe we can agree that bullshit is ideas that exist in the social, philosophical, or religious sphere, while ideas exist in the technical, practical, or economic world. This would allow for a bullshitting caste that basically just peddles nonsense that keeps people together, while others (workers?) generate ideas that move society forward.
But I don't think efforts to separate ideas from bullshit works - or at least, I don't believe ideas and bullshit are separate.
Take the idea that bullshit is deliberate lies, as opposed to ideas, which are sincerely held. It's true that there are people who frantically peddle bad ideas, or people who grit their teeth and latch onto one good idea and insist that all other good ideas are wrong. But the idea that all these people actually "get it," that they really know exactly how ridiculous they're being, and are just bullshitting everyone, violates Hanlon's Razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'll grant that your idea of a bullshitting caste full of liars is going to be at least partly true. But I think it's abundantly obvious that there are at least a significant minority, and more likely an overwhelming majority, who aren't bullshitting at all - they're just clueless. This is why bullshitting works at all, because there are enough people who sincerely don't get it that they can be fooled by bullshit. So saying all the bullshitters are just lying doesn't make sense to me.
Or take the idea that bullshit exists in the social, philosophical, or religious realm, where useful ideas are found in the technical, practical, or economic realm. This matches my observations even less well. One of your best posts argued about why ladies have breasts: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-women-have-breasts . That post really seems much more to answer "How did things end up this way?" than "What are practical solutions to problems in the here-and-now?" Meanwhile Freudianism, Communism, and Cold Fusion seem to me to offer clear, actionable strategies for improving life, all of which have been shown to be basically bullshit.
So this is what I think: If our thinking class today has descended into superstition, virtue-signalling, and bullshit, it is something new, different, and bad about our civilization today, not something that always existed, or necessarily exists among the priests and medicine men. Once upon a time, our media was credible. Once upon a time, our scientists, doctors, and humanities departments were credible. Once upon a time, our governments were credible. Not always, but sometimes. Alas that this does not seem to be one of those times.
Priests have always blended important social and academic functions with bullshit. Predicting the flooding of the Nile was not bullshit. Keeping records for Roman civilization was not bullshit. Redistributing tithes to the medieval poor was not bullshit. Instructing the Mayan nobility in reading, writing, and astronomy was not bullshit. Teaching modern Americans to code is not bullshit.
Even more, much of what we take today as solid science was pioneered by people who were absolutely full of shit, even if they may not have specifically been shoveling bullshit to maintain group solidarity. Kepler and Newton, two of the most important figures in what is known as the scientific revolution, spent an inordinate about of time concerned with mysticism. The same is true of Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution. The Curies were less mystics than they were enamored of seances. What we see when we look back across history is the way in which bullshit has been entwined throughout the thinking of learned men, and indeed entire societies.
People across history have had trouble figuring out what is real, and what isn't. Sometimes they swallow things that are wrong; other times that can't figure out what's right. The obvious implication is that people today are exactly the same. Much of modern thought is gold mistaken as bullshit and vice-versa.
So yes, agreed - modern academians are essentially priests, just as the Neoreactionaries insist. And yes, as you point out, priests have always been in the bullshitting business. But most people who aren't priests are still involved in the same. Babysitters, advertisers, HR personnel, customer service representatives, journalists, military officers, anybody who talks for a living pedals a certain amount of bullshit. When you get them alone and off the record, things do improve... slightly. Unfortunately for most people most the bullshit isn't even deliberate; it's totally intertwined with everything they believe.