2025iii17, Monday: Outside.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the distinction between lies and bullshit is a critical one.

Yes, yes. I know you've heard it before. Not least, several times, from me. But stay with me. This is going somewhere a bit different.

Just to rewind: the distinction originates in On Bullshit, a marvellous piece of writing by the late Harry Frankfurt. It lies in an attitude to truth (or at least to what one perceives as truth). A liar places value on the truth, if only because they seek to say that it is what it is not. An inverse value, perhaps; but a value nonetheless. If a lie mirrors the truth and turns it around, the truth is still needed on the virtual side of the glass.

But a bullshitter cares nothing for the truth. It's an irrelevance. What matters is what they can get away with, what words serve them and their purpose, their wants and needs. It's a selfish, solipsistic, even narcissistic way of speaking. One that - whether by design or by default - sets out to unmoor the listener from reality altogether, and leave them adrift with only the bullshitter's empty song to be guided by.

That's the crucial difference. What binds truthsayers and liars (and here I stress I'm talking about intent, not reality; just because I believe I'm speaking truth doesn't mean I'm right) in strangely common cause is that in speaking they both reach out to something else. Something other than themselves.

Something outside.

Outside is important. Critical, in fact.

Because outside is where you look for guidance. For a basis for action which is more than mere self-interest. For some kind of north star that makes what you say, what you do, what you intend into something with the potential to be objectively worthwhile.

Again: sometimes those words, actions, intents can turn out poisonous. And faith - not a bad word for what we're talking about - can lead to terrible places.

But I'll take it over the bullshitter's self-absorption any day.

This faith in something outside is one of the things that separates good advocates from bad.

Of course there's skill, and experience, and judgment, and all the other things that may start with talent but evolve over time; so long as you're the kind of person who can look at yourself at the end of each day and ask - honestly - what worked, what didn't, and how you can do better tomorrow.

But at the heart of all really good advocates is the bedrock certainty that the law, in all its messy compromise between principle and practice, in all the systems and processes that accrete around it, is our north star. That while we work for our clients, and will strain every sinew for the privilege of being their voice, we do so in the light of our other duty. The one that keeps us doing things right.

The weird thing, and what some (although I suspect fewer than one might fear) lay clients might not understand, is that this subordination - sorta - of a client's needs to those of the court and the law is actually in the clients' best interest. Because despite all its failings, and biases, and inbuilt imbalances of opportunity and resource, the rule of law is the thing without which our world is just one where might is right, and disputes are resolved on the basis of whose gang takes fewer prisoners.

That outside yardstick, fuzzy and bent though it might sometimes be, can be a saviour. And every advocate (at least, every one from a common law background) has had that experience: of reading a judgment through which the law's light shines through like sunrise, taking a sometimes grubby dispute and transmuting it into something that may well mean something fundamental to countless future souls.

Again. Without faith in something outside, we're lost.

This isn't particularly new thinking for me. Not parts of it, anyway. But I was prompted to it by listening to an audiobook: a collection of essays by Francis Spufford, a writer of quite beautiful and moving prose in both non-fiction and fiction. A whole section of the book explores a dialectic of religious belief; its primary focus appears to be (it was mostly written a decade or more ago) the "new atheists" like Dawkins, Coyne and Harris. And one essay begins with the observation - again by no means new or original, and Spufford doesn't for a moment pretend that it is - that believers and atheists are both people of faith, in that both place huge value on whether faith exists or not. Whether it's a real phenomenon, even an immanent one, or a construct, even a form of individual and societal self-harm: it matters.

Now, I know which side of that fence I come down on. (Which won't be a surprise to readers, and others who know me.) And I know that this argument may seem frankly insulting to some atheists: a snide and even dishonest attempt by people who claim some sort of superior contact with the universe to insinuate that non-believers are too stupid properly to interrogate their priors. (I don't think that's the intent at all, but I can appreciate how it might feel that way. The dishonesty cuts both ways, indeed, with some on the no-faith side straw-manning believers with wild abandon.) But setting aside wordplay for a moment, still it does come down to something which either side of a sometimes sterile debate could perhaps agree on: that the conversation is about something important, which isn't merely themselves. That both sides, if they're fair to each other, could accept the other's (sorry) good faith in trying to tackle something outside. Something extrinsic, that's in itself worth arguing about.

And that's the key, isn't it? The true divide. Coming back to bullshit, and returning too to a distinction I've long thought a defining one: between people who at least try to look out at the world and see it, and those who - in reality - pass through life with mirrors before their eyes, so that all they see is a distorted reflection of themselves.

And because all they see is themselves, everyone else is a cipher. A piece on the board. Somehow unreal.

Here's the kicker. Some who think they're seeing the outside, focusing on it, are still really only listening to their own voice inside their head. They may be labelling it as coming from the outside... but no. That's just the echo off the walls of their skull.

They can be really dangerous, those bullshitters who don't know that's what they are.

But no. I fear the others still more. The ones who've made the decision that what is doesn't matter; only what they can get away with. The politicians who'll push any button if it'll open the door they want open for them. The lawyers who'll do or say anything to serve their client, so long as they don't get found out. The people who sell others on a faith - in god, in party, in personality, in anything - that's tailored to their needs, and not to those of the poor benighted faithful.

So. Seek an orientation to something outside. An acknowledgement that there's more than just us. A focal point that's elsewhere. And - while this may sit oddly for some in a discussion where the word "faith" has cropped up (although in fact I'm with Spufford in thinking that faith and doubt must coexist if faith is to be at all emotionally as well as intellectually honest) - a recognition of just how grossly, and frequently, we might be wrong about the thing on which that focal point really concentrates our gaze, and about where it should lead us.

Everyone who believes that shares a bedrock faith. Whatever the details, whatever the creed. And I'll take any of them over the alternative. Any day.