I’VE never been loyal to musicals. I do a solid shower rendition of Damn it, Janet, but Hairspray always make me recoil. And don’t even get me started on Glee. But lately, our household has fallen in love with La La Land. Given recent events, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was a description of the Trump administration rather than delightful (and deserving) Oscar bait. Whilst the distinction between implied reality and flight of fancy was clear to my eldest, I had to contextualise the singing in the street and dancing in the stars for my sons. The narrative ebbs and flows between fact and fantasy, leave the viewer anticipating the next flashpoint – but it’s not always easy to predict or distinguish.

That film is everywhere right now – newspapers, social media, overheard conversations – so it’s very unlikely you’ve missed it.

Speaking of things you might have missed – did you hear about the Bowling Green Massacre? Probably not, because it didn’t happen. It was pulled completely out of the air by Kellyanne Conway – the same sagacious lady who brought us “alternative facts”. Last Thursday, the presidential counsellor conjured up a little story to justify the President’s hasty, unconstitutional immigration ban. Appearing on a television news show, Ms Conway gave a stunning performance in her one-woman play. She delivered her carefully crafted fiction without flinching – that two radicalised Iraqis posing as refugees carried out a terror attack in Kentucky. An attack that categorically did not happen. In 2011, two Iraqi nationals were charged with attempting to send money and weapons to al-Qaeda – though no attack of the nature she described ever took place. Neither men were charged with plotting a terrorist attack in the US. Is this what they mean by fake news?

Shuck away the snappy media terminology and what we have here is a bullshit epidemic. People not only with no concern for the truth and its value to society, but a wilful desire to obfuscate or manipulate it to their own ends. Why has this happened? Because too many have become indiscriminate consumers of information. Why bother to find out if something’s true when it sounds or looks true? When logic is in the driver’s seat, as in any rational individual, it’s easy to brush off these as the woolly words of a bullshitter. But each time we watch a person in high office substitute reality with their own imaginary world, it undermines the value of truth for society at large.

Harry Frankfurt is a Princeton philosopher who gets it, and is refreshingly pithy on the matter: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”

His theory on bullshit goes a long way to throwing some light the chaos that’s unfolding around us right now. He unpacks the idea that we’re living in a time where it’s become a substitute for truth, caused in some way by those who have a platform but don’t have valid things to say. Bullshitters are more insidious than liars because the latter at least have to acknowledge the truth and reject it. BS merchants are motivated by how to represent themselves, and are not concerned with truth, so fill in the factual gaps with noise. Noise that people fail to discern – or chose not to – as distinct from facts. It’s the lazy choice, and if the people don’t demand quality information, then why go to the extra effort?

The undermining of truth through tolerance and normalisation of BS is the reason you can write a whopping great fib on the side of a bus, win votes and still be in a job afterwards. We’re so saturated in it now that our young people are growing up unable to spot it. The results of a recent Stanford study into evaluating information online were so bleak they were described as a threat to democracy. The consequences of many being unable to distinguish fact from conjecture are frankly chilling.

When my four were small I told them a story – one you’ve heard too, and likely for the same reason – The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Parents and teachers impart this cautionary tale of the shepherd who lies about his flock being attacked, to demonstrate the value of the truth and how society regards those who reject it. Aesop’s fable ends with "this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no-one believes them”. Taking stock of recent events, I think that line has rather lost its mojo. If we want to comment on the nature of society and teach based on evidence, we need to get a new fable. How about The Woman Who Cried Xenophobic Massacre (and still earns over $170,000 a year working in government)? Or The Man Who Cried Illegal Immigrant Voter Fraud? Somehow I don’t think either of those will do us much good.

Once upon a time, character was the measure of a person. The virtues and integrity cultivated by an individual over time mattered far more than the personality traits they displayed. Actions were looked at to judge what sort of person you were. Courage was valued. Generosity was valued. As was magnanimity, kindness, dignity and honesty. Somehow we’ve lost sight of those traits in favour of personality. By over-emphasizing how a person presents themself rather than how they conduct themself, we’ve devalued these central, stabilising qualities – and opened the door to unending bombast. We’re going to have to stress the importance of character once more, and to tool up our young people to counter a world where personality and BS are the social currency.

Parents spend a lot of time thinking about the future, reflecting on what their children might be when they grow up, how they’ll look, what sort of life they’ll make for themselves. Today, I spend more time thinking about the kind of people they’ll be, what they’ll value and how they might contribute to society. My sphere of influence is small and constrained by time, but it’s what I do within that sphere in the years I have left that counts. I can’t make my daughter practise her violin if she doesn’t want to, or make my sons read Tolkien– but I can try and show them why the truth matters, even when the evidence presented says otherwise. I have to give them an appetite for facts.

It seems we need to equip ourselves. There are two things we must cultivate, sharpen and pass onto our children – a demand for the truth and a razor-sharp bullshit detector. Perhaps then we can untangle outright lies from politics, and leave them as an historical leitmotif of the dark start of the 21st century.