Here’s the essential skill for assessing our politics: knowing the difference between lies and bullshit | Aditya Chakrabortty

We have suffered both. Some never speak the truth because they don't know or care about it. Others know the truth but lie anyway

Sometimes it falls to an old book to tell us what's new, to a white-bearded philosopher based far from Westminster or Washington to clarify the shifts in our sharp-suited politics. So spare yourself the annual round-ups in the newspapers or the boy-scout enthusiasm of podcasters. To understand the great political shift of this year, the work you need is a piece of philosophy called - what else? - On Bullshit.

I offer it to you this Christmas because surely no reader of mine can resist an essay that begins: One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this." Statements like that made it a bestseller upon re-publication in 2005 and turned its then-75-year-old author, Harry Frankfurt, from a distinguished moral philosopher at Yale and Princeton into a chatshow guest.