post truth essay

Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species.

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Shared fictions — in the form of news, religions, novels, sports, money, even brands — fill our lives, but that’s OK. It’s these shared beliefs that have helped humans cooperate and conquer the planet, explains historian Yuval Harari.

We are repeatedly told these days that we have entered the terrifying new era of post-truth, in which not just particular facts but entire histories might be faked. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era? The internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

Please note that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. Fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit.

Centuries ago, millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit — yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years.

Some fake news lasts forever.

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).

Please note that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous, and creative— just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace and the Harry Potter books.

Again, some people might be offended by my comparison of the Bible to Harry Potter. If you are a scientifically minded Christian, you might argue that the holy book was never meant to be read as a factual account, but rather as a metaphorical story containing deep wisdom. But isn’t that true of the Harry Potter stories too?

Ancient religions have not been the only ones to use fiction to cement cooperation. More recently, each nation has created its own national mythology.

Of course, not all religious myths have been beneficent. On August 29, 1255, the body of a nine-year-old English boy called Hugh was found in a well in the town of Lincoln. Rumor quickly spread that Hugh had been ritually murdered by the local Jews. The story only grew with retelling, and one of the most renowned English chroniclers of the day, Matthew Paris, provided a detailed and gory description of how prominent Jews from throughout England gathered in Lincoln to fatten up, torture, and finally crucify the abandoned child. Nineteen Jews were tried and executed for the alleged murder. Similar blood libels became popular in other English towns, leading to a series of pogroms in which whole Jewish communities were massacred. Eventually, in 1290, the entire Jewish population of England was expelled.

The story doesn’t end there. A century after the expulsion of the Jews, Geoffrey Chaucer included a blood libel modeled on the story of Hugh of Lincoln in the Canterbury Tales (“The Prioress’s Tale”). The tale culminates with the hanging of the Jews. Similar blood libels subsequently became a staple of every anti-Semitic movement from late medieval Spain to modern Russia.

Hugh of Lincoln was buried in Lincoln Cathedral and venerated as a saint. He was reputed to perform various miracles, and his tomb continued to draw pilgrims even centuries after the expulsion of all Jews from England. Only in 1955 — ten years after the Holocaust — did Lincoln Cathedral repudiate the blood libel story, placing a plaque near Hugh’s tomb that reads:

“Trumped-up stories of “ritual murders” of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255. Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom.”

Well, some fake news only lasts seven hundred years.

Ancient religions have not been the only ones to use fiction to cement cooperation. In more recent times, each nation has created its own national mythology, while movements such as communism, fascism and liberalism fashioned elaborate self-reinforcing credos. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro, allegedly explained his method thus: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?

The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you.

Commercial firms also rely on fiction and fake news. Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth. What images come to mind when you think about Coca-Cola? Do you think about healthy young people engaging in sports and having fun together? Or do you think about overweight diabetes patients lying in a hospital bed? Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic — rather, it will increase your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health, and sports — and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.

The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If the chief says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, only true loyalists will clap their hands. Similarly, if all your neighbors believe the same outrageous tale, you can count on them to stand together in times of crisis. If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?

You might argue that in some cases it is possible to organize people effectively through consensual agreement rather than through fictions. In the economic sphere, money and corporations bind people together far more effectively than any god or holy book, even though they are just a human convention. In the case of a holy book, a true believer would say, “I believe that the book is sacred,” while in the case of the dollar, a true believer would say only, “I believe that other people believe that the dollar is valuable.” It is obvious that the dollar is just a human creation, yet people all over the world respect it. If so, why can’t humans abandon all myths and fictions and organize themselves on the basis of consensual conventions such as the dollar?

Yet the difference between holy books and money is far smaller than it might seem. When most people see a dollar bill, they forget that it is just a human convention. As they see the green piece of paper with the picture of the dead white man, they see it as something valuable in and of itself. They hardly ever remind themselves, “Actually, this is a worthless piece of paper, but because other people view it as valuable, I can make use of it.” If you observed a human brain in an fMRI scanner, you would see that as someone is presented with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills, the parts of the brain that start buzzing with excitement are not the skeptical parts but the greedy parts. Conversely, in the vast majority of cases people begin to sanctify the Bible or the Vedas only after long and repeated exposure to others who view it as sacred. We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.

You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief. To enjoy soccer, you have to forget for at least ninety minutes that its rules are merely human inventions.

For this reason there is no strict division in practice between knowing that something is just a human convention and believing that something is inherently valuable. In many cases, people are ambiguous or forgetful about this division. To give another example, in a deep philosophical discussion about it, almost everybody would agree that corporations are fictional stories created by human beings. Microsoft isn’t the buildings it owns, the people it employs, or the shareholders it serves — rather, it is an intricate legal fiction woven by lawmakers and lawyers. Yet 99 percent of the time, we aren’t engaged in deep philosophical discussions, and we treat corporations as if they are real entities, just like tigers or humans.

Blurring the line between fiction and reality can be done for many purposes, starting with “having fun” and going all the way to “survival.” You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief. To really enjoy soccer, you have to accept the rules and forget for at least ninety minutes that they are merely human inventions. If you don’t, you will think it utterly ridiculous for 22 people to go running after a ball. Soccer might begin with just having fun, but it can become far more serious stuff, as any English hooligan or Argentinian nationalist will attest. Soccer can help formulate personal identities, it can cement large-scale communities, and it can even provide reasons for violence.

Humans have a remarkable ability to know and not know at the same time. Or, more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it. If you really focus, you realize that money is fiction. But you usually don’t think about it. If you are asked about it, you know that soccer is a human invention. But in the heat of a match, nobody asks. If you devote the time and energy, you can discover that nations are elaborate yarns. But in the midst of a war, you don’t have the time and energy.

Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity?

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things — for example, about the sources of your own power — that will anger allies, dishearten followers, or undermine social harmony.

Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. If you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better to try your luck with chimps.

Excerpted with permission from the new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari, published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Yuval Noah Harari.

About the author

Yuval Noah Harari is a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of the book Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, which was a best-seller in the US, UK, France, Korea, China and other countries.

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• Yuval Harari

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What we talk about when we talk about post-truth

The presidential limousine drives by empty stands in front of the White House during the presidential inaugural parade on 20 January 2017 in Washington, DC. Photo by Getty

by Diana Popescu   + BIO

As I write this and as you read it, and indeed for several million years into the future, there will be a dummy named Starman in a red Tesla cruising through outer space, playing an infinite loop of David Bowie’s Space Oddity . This achievement of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket carries multiple meanings, but one of them, enthusiastically driven home on Twitter, is that the livestreamed pictures of Starman set against the Earth’s sphere would finally put an end to Flat Earth theories, whose proponents often cite as proof the absence of a clearly distinguishable curve in photographs of the Earth.

For their part, the Flat Earthers, like anti-vaxxers and Pizzagate-believers among other crusaders in our post-truth world, remained unshaken. They cautioned Flat and Round Earthers alike against uncritically trusting all the information shared on the internet via fake-news websites, and asked people to exercise greater critical judgment regarding the sources of online content – in this case, a private company guided by a quest for profit, not truth. They claimed that to use ‘a good car ad’ to establish so crucial a matter as the Earth’s shape is simply ‘a poor argument’. Committed to seeing our planet as a floating two-dimensional circle, they appealed precisely to objectivity, critical judgment and the quest for truth.

Anti-vaxxers who refuse to vaccinate their children due to autism fears tend to care far more about what risks vaccination might carry than, say, a childless scientist might. Few (if any) liberals drove five hours to Washington, DC to check the ‘objective’ facts of Pizzagate – unlike Edgar Maddison Welch, who in 2016 fired shots at the restaurant allegedly at the centre of a paedophile ring run by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. Objective facts and sound verification procedures are not what post-truth groups deplore but, specifically, what drives their dissent. What post-truth groups do deplore are established facts and agreed-upon truths. The issue is one of trust , not verification.

In The Web of Belief (1970), W V Quine and J S Ullian argued that what makes scientific statements true is not their faithful correspondence to external facts, but their internal coherence and the persuasive narrative they jointly form. Our beliefs face the tribunal of experience not one by one, with each matched to facts that directly confirm or disprove it, but as a layered body or web that interacts with observable facts only at its margins.

Whenever a fact contradicts one of our beliefs, we are prompted to restore consistency by revising some of the beliefs in our web. But in choosing what to revise, we are no longer guided by facts alone. Starting from the anomalous evidence, we look at the contested belief and its supporting justification(s), and assess how consistency can be most parsimoniously restored in light of the full web of our beliefs. We can end up revising anything, from doubting that we actually observed the anomalous evidence in the first place, to the principles of logic and mathematics that lie at the centre of our web.

According to the crowdfunded campaign ‘Show BoB The Curve’, a photograph of a city that remains visible at a great distance, instead of being hidden under the horizon, contradicts the belief that the Earth is round. To solve this tension, we can either dismiss the observation as irrelevant given our firmer beliefs in established astronomy and geology, or else question the scientific consensus, based on satellite images and the testimony of astronauts. The first option is less disruptive to our web of belief, but demands that we discount direct empirical observation. The second option – taken by Flat Earthers – vindicates the direct observation but requires that we reject every theory, experiment and observation pointing to a round Earth. The difference is in the epistemic authorities that one trusts , not in the relevance of facts for establishing truth.

T his centrality of trust holds, moreover, for scientists themselves, whose observations rely on trusting in the theories and experiments of colleagues and previous researchers; trusting one’s measuring and interpretative equipment; trusting in the textbooks and lecture materials from where one has learned the fundamentals of a given discipline, etc. Even ‘so-called’ direct observations, writes the British sociologist of science Harry Collins in Gravity’s Shadow (2004), are but ‘tiny corks bobbing on a huge sea of trust’. For Flat Earthers, distrusting the scientific consensus entails replicating evidence that has been at humanity’s disposal since the 1600s, hoping that, through using crowdfunded weather balloons, they will find the opposite answer.

Such wholesale revisionism underscores the social and political impact of post-truth, as well as the false symmetries created by claiming that your detractors are guilty of the very thing of which they accuse you. On the model of Quine and Ullian, such contradictions challenge accepted beliefs across our web, requiring us to choose which authority to trust to restore consistency. In the case of Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds, believing official statements about attendance figures meant distrusting photographic evidence shown across ‘the liberal media’. The disbelief was not isolated to the peripheral observation of a single photograph, but ran through the whole web of belief, challenging all information from this polluted source. Whatever the political gamble, the result is an escalation of epistemic commitment across social divides, creating the impression that the other side is not only in the grip of a false authority, but inhabits a separate reality.

There’s nothing new in relying on authority for establishing truths. But insofar as post-truth is a new reality rather than an old but now more visible one, its novelty resides in distrusting established guarantors of truth, in part simply because they are established, while trusting grassroots observations over the venerable edifice of science. While the appearance is one of subjectivity, it is driven, paradoxically, by a search for objectivity. For this reason, fact-checking cannot combat post-truth, since it’s based on the fundamental misconception that those in the grip of spurious epistemic authorities roughly share the same belief set as us. We need to recognise the fact that when authorities change, the world changes, and the differences are not isolated facts that can be easily weeded out. Invoking images of Starman to refute Flat Earth theory acts as if knowledge proceeded unproblematically from observation reports to theory. Instead, as Collins puts it in Gravity’s Shadow , ‘the causal sequence runs the other way: not from stars to human apprehension, but from human agreement to the stars’.

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How Cognitive Bias Can Explain Post-Truth

To say that facts are less important than feelings in shaping our beliefs about empirical matters seems new, at least in American politics. In the past we have faced serious challenges — even to the notion of truth itself — but never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality, which is how I define “post-truth.” Here, “post” is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are “past” truth in a temporal sense (as in “postwar”) but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed by less important matters like ideology.

One of the deepest roots of post-truth has been with us the longest, for it has been wired into our brains over the history of human evolution: cognitive bias. Psychologists for decades have been performing experiments that show that we are not quite as rational as we think. Some of this work bears directly on how we react in the face of unexpected or uncomfortable truths.

A central concept of human psychology is that we strive to avoid psychic discomfort. It is not a pleasant thing to think badly of oneself. Some psychologists call this “ ego defense ” (after Freudian theory), but whether we frame it within this paradigm or not, the concept is clear. It just feels better for us to think that we are smart, well-informed, capable people than that we are not. What happens when we are confronted with information that suggests that something we believe is untrue? It creates psychological tension. How could I be an intelligent person yet believe a falsehood? Only the strongest egos can stand up very long under a withering assault of self-criticism: “What a fool I was! The answer was right there in front of me the whole time, but I never bothered to look. I must be an idiot.” So the tension is often resolved by changing one of one’s beliefs.

It matters a great deal, however, which beliefs change. One would like to think that it should always be the belief that was shown to be mistaken. If we are wrong about a question of empirical reality — and we are finally confronted by the evidence — it would seem easiest to bring our beliefs back into harmony by changing the one that we now have good reason to doubt. But this is not always what happens. There are many ways to adjust a belief set, some rational and some not.

Three Classic Findings from Social Psychology

In 1957, Leon Festinger published his pioneering book “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” in which he offered the idea that we seek harmony between our beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, and experience psychic discomfort when they are out of balance. In seeking resolution, our primary goal is to preserve our sense of self-value.

In a typical experiment, Festinger gave subjects an extremely boring task, for which some were paid $1 and some were paid $20. After completing the task, subjects were requested to tell the person who would perform the task after them that it was enjoyable. Festinger found that subjects who had been paid $1 reported the task to be much more enjoyable than those who had been paid $20. Why? Because their ego was at stake. What kind of person would do a meaningless, useless task for just a dollar unless it was actually enjoyable? To reduce the dissonance, they altered their belief that the task had been boring (whereas those who were paid $20 were under no illusion as to why they had done it). In another experiment, Festinger had subjects hold protest signs for causes they did not actually believe in. Surprise! After doing so, subjects began to feel that the cause was actually a bit more worthy than they had initially thought.

To one degree or another, all of us suffer from cognitive dissonance.

But what happens when we have much more invested than just performing a boring task or holding a sign? What if we have taken a public stand on something, or even devoted our life to it, only to find out later that we’ve been duped? Festinger analyzed just this phenomenon in a book called “The Doomsday Cult,” in which he reported on the activities of a group called The Seekers, who believed that their leader, Dorothy Martin, could transcribe messages from space aliens who were coming to rescue them before the world ended on December 21, 1954. After selling all of their possessions, they waited on top of a mountain, only to find that the aliens never showed up (and of course the world never ended). The cognitive dissonance must have been tremendous. How did they resolve it? Dorothy Martin soon greeted them with a new message: Their faith and prayers had been so powerful that the aliens had decided to call off their plans. The Seekers had saved the world!

From the outside, it is easy to dismiss these as the beliefs of gullible fools, yet in further experimental work by Festinger and others it was shown that — to one degree or another — all of us suffer from cognitive dissonance. When we join a health club that is too far away, we may justify the purchase by telling our friends that the workouts are so intense we only need to go once a week; when we fail to get the grade we’d like in organic chemistry, we tell ourselves that we didn’t really want to go to medical school anyway. But there is another aspect of cognitive dissonance that should not be underestimated, which is that such “irrational” tendencies tend to be reinforced when we are surrounded by others who believe the same thing we do. If just one person had believed in the “doomsday cult” perhaps he or she would have committed suicide or gone into hiding. But when a mistaken belief is shared by others, sometimes even the most incredible errors can be rationalized.

In his path-breaking 1955 paper “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Solomon Asch demonstrated that there is a social aspect to belief, such that we may discount even the evidence of our own senses if we think that our beliefs are not in harmony with those around us. In short, peer pressure works. Just as we seek to have harmony within our own beliefs, we also seek harmony with the beliefs of those around us.

In his experiment, Asch assembled seven to nine subjects, all of whom but one were “confederates” (i.e., they were “in on” the deception that would occur in the experiment). The one who was not “in on it” was the sole experimental subject, who was always placed at the last seat at the table. The experiment involved showing the subjects a card with a line on it, then another card with three lines on it, one of which was identical in length to the one on the other card. The other two lines on the second card were “substantially different” in length. The experimenter then went around the group and asked each subject to report aloud which of the three lines on the second card were equal in length to the line on the first card. For the first few trials, the confederates reported accurately and the experimental subject of course agreed with them. But then things got interesting. The confederates began to unanimously report that one of the obviously false choices was in fact equal to the length of the line on the first card. By the time the question came to the experimental subject, there was obvious psychic tension. As Asch describes it:

He is placed in a position in which, while he is actually giving the correct answers, he finds himself unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed by a unanimous and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact. Upon him we have brought to bear two opposed forces: the evidence of his senses and the unanimous opinion of a group of his peers.

Before announcing their answer, virtually all dissonance-primed subjects looked surprised, even incredulous. But then a funny thing happened. Thirty-seven percent of them yielded to the majority opinion. They discounted what they could see right in front of them in order to remain in conformity with the group.

Another piece of key experimental work on human irrationality was done in 1960 by Peter Cathcart Wason. In his paper “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Wason took the first in a number of steps to identify logical and other conceptual mistakes that humans routinely make in reasoning. In this first paper, he introduced (and later named) an idea that nearly everyone in the post-truth debate has likely heard of: confirmation bias.

Wason’s experimental design was elegant. He gave 29 college students a cognitive task whereby they would be called on to “discover a rule” based on empirical evidence. Wason presented the subjects with a three-number series such as 2, 4, 6, and said that their task would be to try to discover the rule that had been used in generating it. Subjects were requested to write down their own set of three numbers, after which the experimenter would say whether their numbers conformed to the rule or not. Subjects could repeat this task as many times as they wished, but were instructed to try to discover the rule in as few trials as possible. No restrictions were placed on the sorts of numbers that could be proposed. When they felt ready, subjects could propose their rule.

The results were shocking. Out of 29 very intelligent subjects, only six of them proposed the correct rule without any previous incorrect guesses. Thirteen proposed one incorrect rule and nine proposed two or more incorrect rules. One subject was unable to propose any rule at all. What happened?

As Wason reports, the subjects who failed at the task seemed unwilling to propose any set of numbers that tested the accuracy of their hypothesized rule and instead proposed only those that would confirm it. For instance, given the series 2, 4, 6, many subjects first wrote down 8, 10, 12, and were told “yes, this follows the rule.” But then some just kept going with even numbers in ascending order by two. Rather than use their chance to see whether their intuitive rule of “increase by intervals of two” was incorrect, they continued to propose only confirming instances. When these subjects announced their rule they were shocked to learn that it was incorrect, even though they had never tested it with any disconfirming instances.

When a mistaken belief is shared by others, sometimes even the most incredible errors can be rationalized.

After this, 13 subjects began to test their hypotheses and eventually arrived at the correct answer, which was “any three numbers in ascending order.” Once they had broken out of their “confirming” mindset, they were willing to entertain the idea that there might be more than one way to get the original series of numbers. This cannot explain, however, the nine subjects who gave two or more incorrect rules, for they were given ample evidence that their proposal was incorrect, but still could not find the right answer. Why didn’t they guess 9, 7, 5? Here Wason speculates that “they might not have known how to attempt to falsify a rule by themselves; or they might have known how to do it, but still found it simpler, more certain or more reassuring to get a straight answer from the experimenter.” In other words, at this point their cognitive bias had a firm hold on them, and they could only flail for the right answer.

All three of these experimental results — (1) cognitive dissonance, (2) social conformity, and (3) confirmation bias — are obviously relevant to post-truth, whereby so many people seem prone to form their beliefs outside the norms of reason and good standards of evidence, in favor of accommodating their own intuitions or those of their peers.

Yet post-truth did not arise in the 1950s or even the 1960s. It awaited the perfect storm of a few other factors like extreme partisan bias and social media “silos” that arose in the early 2000s. And in the meantime, further stunning evidence of cognitive bias — in particular the “backfire effect” and the “Dunning–Kruger effect,” both of which are rooted in the idea that what we hope to be true may color our perception of what actually is true — continued to come to light.

Implications for Post-Truth

In the past, perhaps our cognitive biases were ameliorated by our interactions with others. It is ironic to think that in today’s media deluge, we could perhaps be more isolated from contrary opinion than when our ancestors were forced to live and work among other members of their tribe, village, or community, who had to interact with one another to get information. When we are talking to one another, we can’t help but be exposed to a diversity of views. And there is even empirical work that shows the value that this can have for our reasoning.

In his book “ Infotopia ,” Cass Sunstein has discussed the idea that when individuals interact they can sometimes reach a result that would have eluded them if each had acted alone. Call this the “whole is more than the sum of its parts” effect. Sunstein calls it the “interactive group effect.”

When we open our ideas up to group scrutiny, this affords us the best chance of finding the right answer.

In one study, J. C. Wason and colleagues brought a group of subjects together to solve a logic puzzle. It was a hard one, and few of the subjects could do it on their own. But when the problem was later turned over to a group to solve, an interesting thing happened. People began to question one another’s reasoning and think of things that were wrong with their hypotheses, to a degree they seemed incapable of doing with their own ideas. As a result, researchers found that in a significant number of cases a group could solve the problem even when none of its members alone could do so. (It is important to note that this was not due to the “smartest person in the room” phenomenon, where one person figured it out and told the group the answer. Also, it was not the mere “wisdom of crowds” effect, which relies on passive majority opinion. The effect was found only when group members interacted with one another.)

For Sunstein, this is key. Groups outperform individuals. And interactive, deliberative groups outperform passive ones. When we open our ideas up to group scrutiny, this affords us the best chance of finding the right answer. And when we are looking for the truth, critical thinking, skepticism, and subjecting our ideas to the scrutiny of others works better than anything else.

Yet these days we have the luxury of choosing our own selective interactions. Whatever our political persuasion, we can live in a “news silo” if we care to. If we don’t like someone’s comments, we can unfriend him or hide him on Facebook. If we want to gorge on conspiracy theories, there is probably a radio station for us. These days more than ever, we can surround ourselves with people who already agree with us. And once we have done this, isn’t there going to be further pressure to trim our opinions to fit the group?

Solomon Asch’s work has already shown that this is possible. If we are a liberal we will probably feel uncomfortable if we agree with most of our friends on immigration, gay marriage, and taxes, but are not so sure about gun control. If so, we will probably pay a social price that may alter our opinions. To the extent that this occurs not as a result of critical interaction but rather a desire not to offend our friends, this is likely not to be a good thing. Call it the dark side of the interactive group effect, which any of us who has ever served on a jury can probably describe: we just feel more comfortable when our views are in step with those of our compatriots. But what happens when our compatriots are wrong? Whether liberal or conservative, none of us has a monopoly on the truth.

I am not here suggesting that we embrace false equivalence, or that the truth probably lies somewhere between political ideologies. The halfway point between truth and error is still error. But I am suggesting that at some level all ideologies are an enemy of the process by which truth is discovered. Perhaps researchers are right that liberals have a greater “ need for cognition ” than conservatives, but that does not mean liberals should be smug or believe that their political instincts are a proxy for factual evidence. In the work of Festinger, Asch, and others, we can see the dangers of ideological conformity. The result is that we all have a built-in cognitive bias to agree with what others around us believe, even if the evidence before our eyes tells us otherwise. At some level we all value group acceptance, sometimes even over reality itself. But if we care about truth, we must fight against this. Why? Because cognitive biases are the perfect precursor for post-truth.

If we are already motivated to want to believe certain things, it doesn’t take much to tip us over to believing them, especially if others we care about already do so. Our inherent cognitive biases make us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by those who have an agenda to push, especially if they can discredit all other sources of information. Just as there is no escape from cognitive bias, a news silo is no defense against post-truth. For the danger is that at some level they are connected. We are all beholden to our sources of information. But we are especially vulnerable when they tell us exactly what we want to hear.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is the author of several books, including “ Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior ,” “ The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience ,” and “ Post-Truth ,” from which this article is adapted .

Related Article

Post-truth politics and why the antidote isn’t simply ‘ fact-checking ’ and truth

Professor of Politics, University of Sydney

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John Keane received funding from the Australian Research Council.

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This article is part of the Revolutions and Counter Revolutions series, curated by Democracy Futures as a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

It is also part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative , a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney.

This essay is much longer than most Conversation articles, so will take some time to read. Enjoy!

We live in an unfinished revolutionary age of communicative abundance. Networked digital machines and information flows are slowly but surely shaping practically every institution in which we live our daily lives.

For the first time in history, thanks to built-in cheap microprocessors, these algorithmic devices and information systems integrate texts, sounds and images in compact, easily storable, reproducible and portable digital form.

Communicative abundance enables messages to be sent and received through multiple user points, in chosen time, real or delayed, within global networks that are affordable and accessible to billions of people.

My book Democracy and Media Decadence probed the contours of this revolution. It showed why new information platforms, robust muckraking and cross-border publics are among the exciting social and political trends of our time. It proposed that the unfinished revolution is dogged by politically threatening contradictions and decadent counter-trends. The drift toward a world of “post-truth” politics is among these troubling trends.

What exactly is meant by the term post-truth? Paradoxically, post-truth is among the most-talked-about yet least-well-defined meme words of our time. Most observers in the English-speaking world cite the 2016 Word of the Year Oxford English Dictionaries entry : post-truth is the public burial of “objective facts” by an avalanche of media “appeals to emotion and personal belief”.

In China and in the Spanish-speaking world, respectively, commonplace talk of hòu zhēnxiāng and posverdad pushes in this direction. The popularity of the German postfaktisch (post-factual) usage captures much the same meaning. Selected as word of the year by the German language society Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS), it refers to the growing tendency of “political and social discussions” to be dominated by “emotions instead of facts”.

The GfdS adds:

Ever greater sections of the population are ready to ignore facts, and even to accept obvious lies willingly. Not the claim to truth, but the expression of the ‘felt truth’ leads to success in the ‘post-factual age’.

Post-truth communication

A catchword that has gone viral so quickly surely deserves careful attention and crisper definition, especially if we are not to be thrown off balance by a global phenomenon that sets out to do precisely that.

We can say that “post-truth” is not simply the opposite of truth, however that is defined; it is more complicated. It is better described as an omnibus term, a word for communication comprising a salmagundi or assemblage of different but interconnected phenomena.

Its troubling potency in public life flows from its hybrid qualities, its combination of different elements in ways that defy expectations and confuse its recipients.

Post-truth has recombinant qualities. For a start, it is a type of communication that includes old-fashioned lying, where speakers say things about themselves and their world that are at odds with impressions and convictions that they harbour in their mind’s eye.

Liars attempt alchemy: when someone tells lies they wilfully say things they “know” not to be true, for effect. An example is when Donald Trump claims there was never a drought in California , or that during his inauguration the weather cleared , when actually light rain fell throughout his address.

Post-truth also includes forms of public discourse commonly called bullshit. It comprises communication that displaces and nullifies concerns about veracity. Bullshit is hot air talk, verbal excrement that lacks nutrient. It is shooting off at the mouth, backed by the presumption that it is acceptable to others in the conversation.

Post-truth depends as well on buffoonery, bits and pieces of colourful communication designed to attract and distract public attention and to interrupt the background noise of conventional politics and public life. The bric-a-brac component of post-truth includes nonsense moments, jokes and boasting. It embraces clever quips, pedantry and wilful exaggerations (like Marine Le Pen’s description of the European Union as “ a huge prison ”).

There is plenty of rough speech. The contrast with the honey words and smiles of Bill Clinton, Felipe González, Tony Blair and other politicians from yesteryear is striking. The grotesquerie comes in abundance. Geert Wilders specialises in causing trouble, as when he dubs mosques “ palaces of hatred ”.

Disturbingly, there’s abundant talk of the importance of “truth”, by which is usually meant utterances whose veracity is self-confirming, thus proving that truth can attract rogues. There is dog-whistling. There is plain bad taste, as when a newly elected president enters the Houston Astrodome, crammed with traumatised homeless people who have narrowly survived a hurricane, and says: “ Thanks for coming .”

Hair-splitting and wilfully setting things aside are common. The Israeli consul-general in New York, Dani Dayan, does this well, but the genius of evasion is surely Zoltán Kovács , the Orbán government’s spokesman. When subjected to forensic questioning by reporters about Hungary’s imprisonment and brutal maltreatment of refugees and operations by vigilante citizens’ “hunter patrol” border forces, he likes to say:

What you are trying to portray here is non-existent, a gross simplification. Next question.

And that’s that.

Engineered silence

The silencing is not incidental. Post-truth performances feed on their production of silence. They remind us, in the words of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset , that:

… the stupendous reality that is language cannot be understood unless we begin by observing that speech consists above all in silences.

The proponents of post-truth communication relish things unsaid. Their bluff and bluster is designed not only to attract public attention.

It simultaneously hides from public attention things (such as growing inequalities of wealth, the militarisation of democracy and the accelerating death of non-human species) that it doesn’t want others to notice, or that potentially arouse suspicions of the style and substance of post-truth politics.

This engendered silence is not just the aftermath or “leftover” of post-truth communication. Every moment of post-truth communication using words backed by signs and text is actively shaped by what is unsaid, or what is not sayable.

The communicative performances of the post-truth champions are thus the marginalia of silence: mere foam and waves on its deep waters.

That is why the current hyper-concentration of journalists and other public commentators on “breaking news” stories about “fake news”, “alternative facts” and missing “evidence” is so potentially misleading.

Their fetish of breaking news turns them unwittingly into the poodles of post-truth and its silence about things less immediate and less obvious, deeper institutional trends, “slower” events marked by punctuated rhythms.

Vaudeville and gaslighting

Treating post-truth as a species of pugnacious politics dressed in a coat of many colours, as a bricolage of lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence, helps us grasp its vaudeville quality.

When thought of as a public performance led by a cast of politicians, journalists, public relations agencies, think tanks and other players, post-truth is an updated, state-of-the-art political equivalent of early 20th-century vaudeville performances.

Old-fashioned vaudeville featured strongmen and singers, dancers and drummers, minstrels and magicians, acrobats and athletes, comedians and circus animals. It was a show. Post-truth is equally a show. Directed against conventional styles of performance, it is an orchestrated public spectacle designed to invite and entertain millions of people.

But post-truth is much more than entertainment, or the “ art of contrivance ” or the “ dictatorship of illusion ” mediated by the production and passive consumption of commodities.

While the genealogy of post-truth is partly traceable to the world of corporate advertising and market-driven entertainment, it has thoroughly political qualities. In the hands of the powerful, or those bent on climbing the ladders of power over others, the post-truth phenomenon functions as a new weapon of political manipulation.

Post-truth is not only about winning votes, siding with friends, or dealing with political foes. It has more sinister effects. It is a gaslighting exercise.

Drawn from George Cukor’s award-winning Gaslight , starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, the term gaslighting is here defined as a weapon of the will to power. It is the organised effort by public figures to mess with citizens’ identities, to deploy lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence for the purpose of sowing seeds of doubt and confusion among subjects.

Gaslighting is typically a preferred tactic of narcissistic and aggressive personalities bent on doing whatever it takes to gain and maintain a position of advantage over others.

Their point is to disorient and destabilise people. They want to harness people’s self-doubts, ruin their capacity for seeing the world ironically, destroy their capacity for making judgements, in order to drive them durably into submission.

When (for instance) gaslighters say something, only later to say that they never said such a thing and that they would never have never dreamed of saying such a thing, their aim is gradually to turn citizens into mere playthings of power.

When that happens, the victims of gaslighting no longer trust their own judgements. They buy into the tactics of the manipulator. Not knowing what to believe, they give up, shrug their shoulders and fall by default under the spell of the gaslighter.

Consider the double act of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his former right-hand gaslighter, Ernesto Abella, in the sequence of events triggered by the murder (in November 2016) of Rolando Espinosa, the elected mayor of Albuera, an island community some 575 kilometres from Manila.

When asked by journalists to explain what had happened, Duterte reportedly said :

He was killed in a very [questionable way], but I don’t care. The policemen said he resisted arrest. Then I will stick with the story of the police because [they are] under me.

Espinosa was in fact shot in detention, inside a police cell.

Duterte continued:

I might go down in history as the butcher. It’s up to you.

Since I have nothing to show, I just use extrajudicial killing. [That’s because] I have no credentials to boast about.

The intended meaning of these utterances (to put things mildly) was oracular, so mystifyingly opaque that they served as the cue for Abella to strut his stuff: to go on air and to say that this or that never happened, that Duterte never said what people heard him say, that Bisaya-speaking Duterte got lost in translation when speaking in Tagalog, to affirm at Malacañang press conferences that his intentions are good and that he is utterly sincere, whereas his enemies are wilful dissemblers, fools and toads.

Abella insisted he provided not “crumbs”, but “meat, deboned”. Armed with his favourite phrases, “let’s just say” and “let’s put it this way”, he described his job as “completing the sentences” of his leader, to “impart his true intentions”.

In this murder case, Abella said , “it is … a matter of the leadership style and the messaging style of the president”. He added:

This is his messaging style to underline his intention. He is serious about it [the drug menace]. However, it’s just meant to underline his seriousness in making sure that nobody is corrupt and involved in criminality.

What makes post-truth different from the past?

The meandering rhetoric is designed to bewitch and beguile, which is why the critics of post-truth are sounding alarms and issuing stern warnings about the dangerous charms of the vaudeville show of political mendacity, nonsense, buffoonery and silence.

They emphasise that political lying and bad manners spiced with talk of “fake news” and “alternative facts” are sinister, a frontal challenge to the basic democratic norms of open and plural communication among citizens.

Complaints against post-truth are often robust, loud and couched in high moral tones. Post-truth is said to be the beginning of the end of politics as we’ve known it in existing democracies.

There is talk of an emergent “post-truth era”. More than a few critics warn that the spread of post-truth is the harbinger of a new “totalitarianism”. Others speak of populist dictatorship or “fascism-lite” government.

The descriptors are questionable, and display little understanding of the historical originality of the present drift towards government by gaslighting. Politics as the art of evasion, befuddlement and engineered public silence isn’t new. Lying in politics is an ancient art. Think of Plato’s noble lie, or Machiavelli’s recommendation that a successful prince must be “ a great pretender and dissembler ”, or Harry Truman’s description of Richard Nixon as:

… a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

Some things don’t change. Still, there are several things that are unusual about the gaslighting trends of our time. Each is bound up with the unfinished communications revolution.

The digital merging and melding of text, sound and image, the advent of cheap copying and the growing ease of networked information spreading across vast distances in real time are powerful drivers of post-truth decadence.

New techniques and tools of communication are its condition of possibility; they enable its production, rapid circulation and absorption into the body politics of democracies, and well beyond.

Think of photoshopped materials and mashups, web applications and pages that recycle content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. Trump’s first campaign advertisement showed migrants allegedly crossing the Mexican border; in fact, it was an image of migrants crossing from Morocco to Melilla in North Africa.

Then consider impostor news sites (using URLs such as abc.com.co) and fantasy news sites, such as WTOE 5 News , which created the “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Trump for President” story , built using such tools as Clone Zone and NowThis .

Ponder shareable made-up news platforms ( Macedonian teenagers making money, Christian fundamentalists peddling the Spirit), meme launch pads (Twitter and Facebook) and parody accounts ( The Onion , “America’s Finest News Source”).

There are also the devoted fanzine platforms that specialise in hailing heroes and trolling opponents, the platforms that sit for the first time in the White House press briefing room, platforms such as Gateway Pundit , One American News Network , Newsmax , LifeZette and the Daily Caller .

Some say none of this is new. From the outset, they insist, daily newspapers printed gossip, rumours and lies. Orson Welles proved that radio could produce scams. Television was a state weapon for mass-producing fabricated illusions; and so on.

But the sceptics underestimate the multiple ways in which, in matters of truth and post-truth, the communications revolution is marked by novel dynamics that are producing novel effects.

Most obviously, the digital communications revolution tends to undermine space-time barriers so that the raw material of lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence produced by gaslighters develops long global legs.

Post-truth spreads; it knows no borders. So, for instance, many Muslims living in countries as far apart as Britain, Pakistan and Indonesia understand that they are among the targets of the project of attacking “fake news” and making America great again.

There’s something else that’s new: post-truth discourse penetrates so deeply into our daily lives that what is commonly called the private sphere ceases to be private. It’s no longer a safe haven or a zone of counter-balance, in the way (say) it functioned as the point of resistance against total power in the age of the typewriter or in George Orwell’s 1984, where Winston was still able to retreat to a corner table to scribble, out of sight of Big Brother.

The colonisation of daily life by the so-called Internet of Things , digital robots that collect and spread information, guarantees that the geographic footprint of post-truth is vast and potentially total.

There’s yet another novelty of our period: the production and diffusion of post-truth communication by populist leaders, political parties and governments. The historical record shows that our times are no exception to the old rule that populism is a recurrent autoimmune disease of democracy.

The present-day political irruption of populism is fuelled by the institutional decay of electoral democracy, combined with growing public dissatisfaction with politicians, political parties and “politics”.

Reinforced by the failure of democratic institutions to respond effectively to anti-democratic challenges such as the growing influence of cross-border corporate power, worsening social inequality and the dark money poisoning of elections, the decadence is proving to be a lavish gift to leaders, parties and governments peddling the mantra of “the sovereign people”.

Populist figures otherwise as different as Viktor Orbán, Norbert Hofer and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are oversized vaudeville characters. They are merchants of post-truth, exploiters of trust and confidence artists who take advantage of the communications revolution.

They stir up multimedia excitement by calling for a public revolt by millions of people who feel annoyed, powerless and no longer “held” ( D.W. Winnicott ) in the arms of society: people who are so frustrated or humiliated that they are willing to lash out in support of demagogues promising them dignity and a better future.

Some people fall for the promises not because they “naturally” crave leaders, or yield to the inherited “ fascism in us all ”. Among the strangest and most puzzling features of the post-truth phenomenon is the way it attracts people into voluntary servitude because it raises their hopes and expectations of betterment.

Truth is the answer? Don’t believe it

The most surprising long-term effect of communicative abundance and the spread of post-truth is arguably their reinforcement of the modern questioning and rejection of arrogant beliefs in truth.

The possibility that post-truth politics is party to the “ farewell to truth ” is poorly understood, especially by critics of post-truth, who invariably rally to the cause of what they casually call truth.

Although the term is usually left undefined, their attachment to truth helps explain why many academics, journalists and public commentators typically accuse the “postmodernism” of recent decades of being the unwitting accomplice or active foot servant of post-truth politics.

They are convinced that the “relativism” of the postmodernists unhelpfully adds to the confusion surrounding “truth” based on “evidence” and “facts”. What is now urgently needed, they say, is the recovery of truth.

But what is truth? Truth is the antidote to post-truth, they reply. It is observable. Truth is saying or writing or visualising, somehow depicting things that correspond to “reality”.

The champions of truth understood as adequation sometimes cite the Polish-American mathematician Alfred Tarski , who famously put things this way: the proposition that “snow is white” (“p”) is true if and only if snow is white (“p is true if and only if p”). It’s seeing language as a conveyor belt, as a medium for recording a “reality” that is external to the observer.

Tough versions of the orthodoxy insist that evidence is evidence, reality is real and “ brute facts ” exist independently of anyone’s attitude toward them.

It’s not only philosophers who speak in this fashion. Journalists, lawyers, more than a few academics, plenty of environmental activists and data scientists are in the truth trade.

Believers in truth, a word that is usually left undefined, they have a habit of supposing that reality is all around them, out there, within arm’s reach or just beyond arm’s length, graspable and catchable through redescription, for instance in the form of data.

Such conceptions of “ objectivity ” fail to rethink the whole idea of truth as a necessary condition of ridding the world of post-truth decadence. Their failure to cast doubt simultaneously upon both post-truth and truth, to see them as partners rather than as opponents, ignores the need for a new geography and history of truth.

Truth varies through space and time

The geography of truth highlights the spatial dimensions of truth-seeking and attempts to live the truth. What counts as truth varies from place to place.

The French Renaissance writer Montaigne famously said that what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is falsehood on the other side. Foucault repeats the point in his account of the birth of truth-telling ( le dire vrai ) within clinics and prisons.

Scholarly studies of the way cities (Escuela de Salamanca, Chicago School of Economics, Copenhagen School) have shaped what counts as knowledge push in the same direction.

The geography of truth equally matters within any given society, at any given time. The Pitjantjatjara peoples of central Australia still today use a family of terms like mula and mula-mulani and mulapa to refer to a “true story” that is inscribed with both connotations of “a long time” and calls for agreement between story tellers and listeners.

When Pitjantjatjara peoples speak of truth, they understand they are engaged in efforts to convince others of the rightness of their tradition. They recognise what mainstream white society usually forgets: that truth and trust are twins.

A new geography of truth would also note that there are spaces of life that either have little or nothing to do with truth, or where references to truth are simply out of place (Bertolt Brecht once remarked that if someone stood up in front of a group of strikers and said 2+2=4 they would no doubt be jeered), or where telling the truth has dangerous consequences, as when a Rohingya father lies to a Myanmar army patrol hunting women to rape by telling them on his doorstep he has no daughters.

What counts as truth varies not only through space but also through time. Truth has a controversial history; truth has never straightforwardly been truth. There is a history of truth that shows that what counts as truth varies through time, but also (the corollary) that what is today taken as truth has not always been so.

Ancient Greek understandings of truth as aletheia , a difficult word variously translated as “disclosure” or “un-concealedness”, are evidently different than Christian understandings of “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) and the imperative to tell the truth, shame the devil.

The early modern European period was marked by bitter struggles over the meaning of religious “truth”, calls for religious toleration and the deployment, by believers in truth, of such tactics of deception as occultism, the Catholic doctrine of mental reservation and Protestant casuistry.

The public controversies about truth among Christians encompassed Luther’s explosive, influential attack on popery as the sole interpreter of scripture in An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520). They extended to Lessing’s recommendation that we should thank God that we don’t know the truth (“ Sage jeder, was ihm Wahrheit dünkt, und die Wahrheit selbst sei Gott empfohlen ” [“Let each person say what s/he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God”]); and Tocqueville’s observation that the modern democratic revolution powerfully calls into question so-called public truths about the “natural” inferiority of slaves and women.

Democracy doubts both post-truth and ‘the truth’

The public sense that truth claims are contestable and mutable interpretations is undoubtedly bolstered by the multi-media communications revolution, and by the advent of new forms of monitory democracy featuring a plethora of mediated platforms where power is publicly interrogated and chastened.

Monitory democracy promotes the growth of public spaces where uncertainty, doubt, scepticism, irony and modesty in the face of arbitrary power are nurtured.

Wittgenstein’s recommendation that saying “I know” should be banned so that people would be required to say “I believe I know” makes good sense under these conditions. We could say that post-truth politics is the dark and messy side of an unfinished quantum shift in support of the pluralisation of people’s lived perceptions of the world.

Yes, talk of truth is not disappearing, or dead. Just as unbelievers continue to say “Lord help us” and “Jesus Christ”, and despite Copernicus people still speak of the setting sun, so the language of truth lives on in people’s lives.

Yet nowadays tropes like “ We hold these truths to be self-evident ” arouse public suspicions. The truth is out that truth has many faces.

What counts as “truthful information” is less and less understood by wise citizens as “hard facts” or as indisputable “evidence” or as chunks of “reality” to be mined from television and radio programs, or from newspapers, digital platforms and “expert” authorities.

In the age of communicative abundance and monitory democracy, “reality” is multiple and mutable. “Reality”, including the lies and buffoonery and other forms of gaslighting peddled by the powerful, comes to be understood as always “reported reality”, as “reality” produced by some for others – in other words, as messages that are shaped and reshaped and reshaped again in the process of transmission and reception.

This disenchantment of truth has everything to do with democracy. Considered as a universal norm liberated from metaphysical foundations, as a whole way of life committed to the defence of complex equality, freedom and difference, democracy in monitory form is the guardian of a plurality of lived interpretations of life.

The radical originality of monitory democracy is its defiant insistence that peoples’ lives are never simply given, that all things human are built on the shifting sands of space-time, and that no person or group, no matter how much “truth” or power they presently enjoy or want to claim, can be trusted permanently, in any given context, to govern other people’s lives.

Democracy is thus the best human weapon so far invented for guarding against the “ illusions of certainty ” and breaking up truth-camouflaged monopolies of power, wherever they operate. Democracy is not a True and Right norm. Just the reverse: the norm of monitory democracy is aware of its own and others’ limits, knows that it doesn’t know everything, and understands that democracy has no meta-historical guarantees. That is why it does not suffer truth-telling dogmatists and fools gladly.

Democracy is a living reminder that truths are never self-evident, and that what counts as truth is a matter of interpretation. Recognising that in political life “ truth has a despotic character ”, democracy stands for a world beyond truth and post-truth.

This is not because all women and men are “naturally” created equal. Rather, it’s because democracy supposes that no man or woman is good enough to claim they know the truth and to rule permanently over their fellows and the earthly habitats in which they dwell.

You can read other articles in the series here .

The theme of truth, post-truth and the unfinished communications revolution is further explored in a recently published thepaper.cn interview, The Revival of Truth Isn’t the Remedy for Post-Truth (available only in Chinese).

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Covering Politics in a “Post-Truth” Washington :

Journalism has never been better, thanks to these last few decades of disruption. So why does it seem to matter so little? Reflections on the media in the age of Trump.

For the last two decades, the rules of political reporting have been blown up. And I’ve cheered at every step along the way. Not for me the mourning over the dismantling of the old order, all those lamentations about the lost golden era of print newspapers thudding on doorsteps and the sage evening news anchors reporting back to the nation on their White House briefings. Because, let’s face it: too much of Washington journalism in the celebrated good old days was an old boys’ club, and so was politics—they were smug, insular, often narrow-minded, and invariably convinced of their own rightness.

The truth is that coverage of American politics, and the capital that revolves around it, is in many ways much better now than ever before—faster, sharper, and far more sophisticated. There are great new digital news organizations for politics and policy obsessives, political science wonks, and national security geeks. Today’s beat reporters on Capitol Hill are as a rule doing a far better job than I did when I was a rookie there two decades ago, and we get more reporting and insight live from the campaign trail in a day than we used to get in a month, thanks to Google and Facebook, livestreaming and Big Data, and all the rest. Access to information—by, for, and about the government and those who aspire to run it—is dazzling and on a scale wholly unimaginable when Donald Trump was hawking his Art of the Deal in 1987. And we have millions of readers for our work now, not merely a hyper-elite few thousand.

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.

But this is 2016, and Trump has just been elected president of the United States after a campaign that tested pretty much all of our assumptions about the power of the press. Yes, we are now being accused—and accusing ourselves—of exactly the sort of smug, inside-the-Beltway myopia we thought we were getting rid of with the advent of all these new platforms. I’m as angry as everybody else at the catastrophic failure of those fancy election-forecasting models that had us expecting an 85 percent or even a ridiculous 98 percent—thanks Huffington Post!—chance of a Hillary Clinton victory. All that breathless cable coverage of Trump’s Twitter wars and the live shots of his plane landing on the tarmac didn't help either. And Facebook and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

As editor of Politico throughout this never-to-be-forgotten campaign, I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century and what we could have done differently. (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.) But journalistic handwringing aside, I still think reporting about American politics is better in many respects than it’s ever been.

I have a different and more existential fear today about the future of independent journalism and its role in our democracy. And you should too. Because the media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter. Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year. Even fact-checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated. Tellingly, a few days after the election, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers. Needless to say, none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

Of course, there’s always been a fair measure of cynicism—and more than a bit of demagoguery—in American politics and among those who cover it, too. But I’ve come to believe that 2016 is not just another skirmish in the eternal politicians versus the press tug of war. Richard Nixon may have had his “enemies list” among the media, but the difference is that today Trump as well as his Democratic adversaries have the same tools to create, produce, distribute, amplify, or distort news as the news industry itself—and are increasingly figuring out how to use them. The bully pulpits, those of the press and the pols, have proliferated, and it’s hard not to feel as though we’re witnessing a sort of revolutionary chaos: the old centers of power have been torn down, but the new ones have neither the authority nor the legitimacy of those they’ve superseded. This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds. Nature, not to mention Donald Trump, abhors a vacuum.

It’s certainly been fun storming the castle over these last couple decades. But it’s hard not to look at what just happened in this crazy election without worrying: Did we finally just burn it down? And how, anyways, did we get here?

Reporting like it’s 1989

I first came to work in Washington at the back end of the 1980s, during the second-term funk of the Reagan Revolution, as the city obsessed over the Iran-Contra scandal and the rise of rabble-rousing conservatives on Capitol Hill led by a funny-haired guy named Newt Gingrich. Within a few years, Gingrich and Co. would launch an ethics investigation to take out a powerful Speaker of the House, Texan Jim Wright, who left town warning of the new age of “mindless cannibalism” they had unleashed. It was the twilight of the Cold War, even if we didn’t realize it at the time. One November afternoon during my junior year in college I took a nap and when I went downstairs a short while later, I found the security guard in the dorm lobby staring incredulously at a tiny portable TV that had suddenly materialized on his desk. The Berlin Wall had come down while I was sleeping, and it didn’t take an international relations scholar to figure out that pretty much everything, including our politics here at home, was about to change.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post ; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek . That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news. Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times , they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists. And because it was such a small in-crowd, they were readily subject to manipulation; the big media crisis of the Reagan era was all about the ease with which the journalists could be spun or otherwise coopted into the Hollywood-produced story line coming out of Reagan’s media savvy White House, which understood that a good picture was worth more than thousands of words, no matter how hard-hitting.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

Which was why I felt lucky to have landed at a newspaper that was an early harbinger of the media revolution to come. My dad, an early and proud media disruptor himself since the days when he and my mother founded Legal Times , a weekly dedicated to “law and lobbying in the nation’s capital,” had steered me to Roll Call after seeing a story about it buried in the Post ’s business section in the spring of 1987. A sort of old-fashioned community bulletin board for Capitol Hill, it had been around for decades but had just been bought for $500,000 by Arthur Levitt, chairman of the American Stock Exchange. Under its new management, Roll Call would now aspire to create real original reporting and scoops for an exclusive audience made up of members of Congress—and the thousands of staffers, lobbyists, political consultants, and activists who served them or sought to influence them. I saw this as an unalloyed good: more tough, independent reporting about an institution that sorely needed it.

This was a pretty radical departure for a quirky tabloid that had been launched by a Hill aide named Sidney Yudain just as the McCarthy era was ending in the 1950s. By the ‘80s, his Roll Call was celebrating a Congress that hardly existed anymore, a hoary institution of eating clubs with silly names, of boarding houses on the Hill where members of both parties holed up without their families while Congress was in session. The paper was perhaps best known for the Hill staffer of the week feature—invariably an attractive young woman—that Sid used to run on page 2 each edition; his most famous model was Elizabeth Ray, who posed vamping on a desk a few years before she admitted to reporters that she couldn’t type, file, or “even answer the phone” though she was a $14,000-a-year secretary to Rep. Wayne Hays.

Jim Glassman, Roll Call ’s new editor and publisher, hit on a very different formula for the paper. In this day and age when we celebrate new technology as the source of all media innovation, it seems decidedly retro, but it worked, as both journalism and a business: He hired a staff of aggressive young reporters—I started as an intern in the summer of 1987, then returned full-time after graduating in 1990—and set them loose on the backstage news of Washington. Let Congressional Quarterly send legions of scribes to write down what was said at dull committee hearings, he decreed; Roll Call would skip the boring analyses of policy to cover what really mattered to DC—the process and the people. To make it a must-read, Jim had another rule that made lots of sense: Nothing on our front page should have appeared anywhere else. If it wasn’t exclusive, he didn’t want it. Everybody was already reading The Washington Post ; why would they bother with Roll Call , he figured, if it couldn’t deliver stories no one else had?

Soon his reporters were delivering. One of them, Tim Burger, broke the story of the massive overdrafts by free-spending congressmen that would become known as the House Bank scandal, contributing to the exit of dozens of members in the 1992 elections and helping set the stage for the 1994 Gingrich revolution, when Republicans would finally take back control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than forty years. The ad revenues were flowing too; Jim had found that by making Roll Call a must-read on Capitol Hill and unleashing far more reporting firepower on previously unaccountable dark corners of the Washington power game, he had scores of companies and lobbying groups eager to buy what was now branded “issue advocacy” advertising. Until then, those groups had been paying $50,000 or more for a full-page ad in the Post to reach those whose attention they sought—members of Congress and their staffers—along with hundreds of thousands of readers who were basically irrelevant to them. Roll Call undercut the competition, at first charging as little as a few thousand dollars per page to target, far more efficiently, the audience that the advertisers wanted. Soon, we were coming out twice a week. The scoops—and the ads—kept rolling in.

Within just a few years, Roll Call had been sold to The Economist Group for $10 million. Not long after, when I met Bo Jones, then the publisher of The Washington Post , the first thing he said to me was what a mistake the Post had made by not buying Roll Call itself. The fragmenting of the media had begun.

When news traveled slowly … DC before the web

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine. Looking for details about foreign countries lobbying in Washington or big companies paying huge fees? Only by going in person to the Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission could you get it, and too often reporters in that fat, happy, almost-monopoly era didn’t bother.

When I started reporting in Washington, once or twice a week we would gather around the conference table in Roll Call ’s offices near Union Station to sift through a large stack of clips from local newspapers around the country, organized by state and sold to us by a clipping service. Though the stories were sometimes weeks old by the time we were reading them, we’d divvy up the pile to find nuggets that had not yet been reported to the political insiders in Washington: a new development in Connecticut’s heated 5th Congressional District race, a House member under fire out in Oklahoma or Utah. It seems almost inconceivable in the Google-Twitter-always-on media world we live in now, but Congressional Quarterly charged us thousands of dollars a year for this service, and we paid.

Soon enough, CQ wasn’t selling those clips anymore—that line of business having been disrupted not by the internet, which was still in its balky, dial-up, you’ve-got-AOL-mail stage, but by the fax machine. The Hotline was a faxed newsletter that came out late morning every day, a compilation of headlines and news nuggets from around the country. We were addicted to it. I remember the feeling of anticipation as its pages spilled off the machine and curled up on the floor while we pestered Jane, our copy editor, to make copies for each of us.

Social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

The same proliferation of news—and noise—was happening all over town. While we were busy reporting previously ignored stories the big guys didn’t know or care about, the upstarts at cable news were filling not just one carefully edited nightly newscast but 24 hours a day with reports—and, increasingly, shouty partisan talk shows—about goings on in the capital. We all watched those too. Access to information has always been Washington’s currency; speed up the news cycle, and we had no choice but to race ahead right along with it.

In 1998, I started work at The Washington Post as the investigative editor on the national desk. Little more than a week after my arrival, on January 17, 1998, at 9:32 on a Saturday night, Matt Drudge’s website first leaked word of the blockbuster scandal that was about to engulf President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I had expected to edit stories about Clinton’s aggressive fundraising in the White House, not his dalliance with a former intern. But now it seemed that independent prosecutor Ken Starr’s unprecedented probe could even force the president to quit, and I remember well the day we all stood riveted in front of the TVs in the Post ’s famous fifth-floor newsroom to watch Clinton’s less-than-convincing denials of “sexual relations with that woman.” Over the weeks that followed, the internet drove a Washington news story as it never had before: The Drudge Report had proved beyond a doubt that the old gatekeepers of journalism would no longer serve as the final word when it came to what the world should know.

But some things didn’t change as fast as all that.

At the Post , I soon learned, internet access was still handed out as a privilege to individual editors on a need-to-have-it basis. Everyone else was expected to go to the paper’s in-house library, where researchers would search the internet and various databases on our behalf and one could request paper files of moldering clips to inspect while pounding out a story on deadline. Needless to say, the wheels ground slowly. I may have been the assignment editor overseeing coverage of the spiraling investigation of the president of the United States, but it was only with much lobbying and obscure bureaucratic machinations that I arranged for a clunky dial-up external modem to land on my desk weeks into the scandal.

By the time the story culminated in a presidential confession and an unprecedented Senate impeachment trial and acquittal, the internet would no longer be considered a perk but a necessity for our news-gathering. My soon-to-be husband, White House reporter Peter Baker, would file the paper’s first web-specific dispatches from the congressional impeachment debates. And when the slow machinery of government responded to the new, faster era by releasing its legal filings and document dumps electronically (then as now these would invariably occur late on Friday afternoons, preferably before a holiday weekend), we in turn responded by making them available online for all the world to see. In the end, the Lewinsky affair gave us more than the icky Starr report, with its talk of Lewinsky’s blue dress and thong underwear and the inappropriate use of cigars in the Oval Office. Washington scandals would remain a constant in the coming decades, but how we covered them would be different.

Still, it remained a print world in ways that are hard even to imagine now.

The old presses shook the Post building starting around 10 p.m. each night just as they had for decades, and sometimes, if the news was big, as it often was during the 13 long months of the Lewinsky scandal, there would be a line of people waiting in front when the first edition came out around midnight. The nightly 6 p.m. front-page meetings in the old conference room with the framed “Nixon Resigns” headline staring down at us were taken very seriously, and the feverish lobbying for a spot on that page was an indication of how much we were all convinced it mattered. Although we had a website by then and published our articles on it each night, the national editors of the Post still trusted the more ancient methods of finding out what the competition was up to: at 9 p.m., the news aide in the New York bureau would be patched through on speakerphone as she held up her receiver to the radio, so that we could hear the announcer on the New York Times -owned WQXR radio station reading out the early headlines from the next day’s Times . When the Starr report finally came out in September of 1998, we printed the entire thing—all 41,000 words—as a special section in the next day’s newspaper, and the only debate I recall was not whether we should make such a sacrifice of trees when the whole thing was available online but whether and if to edit out any of the more overtly R-rated parts of the report on the president and his twenty-something girlfriend’s White House antics.

At the end of the impeachment scandal, as Vice President Al Gore was busy blowing his lead over Texas Governor George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential race and an unknown former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin was rising from obscurity to emerge as Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked successor as president of Russia, Peter and I decided to move to Moscow as foreign correspondents for the Post . Before we headed out, we went up to the ninth floor of the boxy old Post building on 15th Street in downtown Washington to say goodbye to owner Don Graham. As the conversation ended, we asked Don how the paper was doing. At this point, the Post still claimed the highest “penetration” rate of any big paper in the country among readers in its metropolitan area and had spent the boom decade of the 1990s investing $230 million in its physical printing presses while adding dozens of reporters to its newsroom, the vast majority devoted to local coverage of the fast-growing D.C. suburbs.

We’ll be fine, Don told us, as long as the classified ads don’t go away.

Four years later, when we returned from Moscow and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the classifieds were essentially gone. Soon to be followed by those pages and pages of Macy’s ads and supermarket coupons. But hundreds of reporters and editors were still showing up at the giant newsroom each day to produce a print newspaper, while the website that would be its future—or its demise—was still largely an afterthought run by a team both legally and physically separated from the newsroom, across the Potomac River in a soulless office tower in Arlington, Virginia.

Disrupting the disruptors

It’s hard even to conjure that media moment now. I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

Where do you get your election news?

In the 2016 presidential race 18–29 years old say social media. Everyone else says cable news.

18–29

• 35 Social Media
• 18 News website/app
• 12 Cable TV news
• 10 Local TV
• 6 Late night comedy
• 4 Network nightly news
• 2 Issue-based group
• 1 Local paper in print
• 1 Candidate or campaign
• 1 National paper in print

30–49

• 21 Cable TV news
• 19 News website/app
• 15 Social Media
• 14 Local TV
• 7 Network nightly news
• 4 Late night comedy
• 2 Local paper in print
• 2 National paper in print
• 1 Issue-based group

50–64

• 25 Cable TV news
• 19 Local TV
• 14 Network nightly news
• 10 News website/app
• 5 Local paper in print
• 5 Social Media
• 2 Late night comedy
• <1 Candidate or campaign
• 43 Cable TV news
• 17 Network nightly news
• 6 Local paper in print
• 5 News website/app
• 5 National paper in print
• 1 Social Media
• 1 Late night comedy

In fact, the pace of change has speeded up so much that the Washington disruptors are themselves now getting disrupted.

Take Roll Call , whose trajectory since I worked there reveals much about the ups and downs of Washington journalism. At first, it grew fast, expanding to four days a week after I left, and eventually, in 2009, paying the almost unthinkable sum of $100 million to gobble up the entire Congressional Quarterly empire it had started out dismissively competing with. It seemed to work brilliantly as a business too: The “issue advocacy” market Roll Call did so much to create is now estimated to be worth some hundreds of millions of dollars a year, along with the equally robust trade in insider subscription news and information services to navigate what’s really going on in official Washington, which is why Bloomberg dropped a reported astonishing $1 billion—in cash—in 2011 to buy BNA, a Washington-based company of specialized policy newsletters on everything from agriculture to taxes.

But Roll Call ’s own share of that booming market has dropped precipitously. First came The Hill , a new competitor that launched in 1994 and has recently positioned itself as a sort of down-market, high-traffic internet tabloid for Washington. Then came Politico , founded by two former Post colleagues of mine and owner Robert Allbritton in late 2006.

Politico aimed to own and shape the Washington conversation—and to compete at both ends of the Washington journalism food chain. It took on the Post at a time when the big daily newspaper just couldn’t wrap itself around the newly competitive reality of the digital era, and also smacked down niche players like Roll Call , which had been the first to get how much faster the Washington news cycle could be but struggled to catch up to the even faster new rhythms of the web and was in any case more worried about preserving the hard-won print ad dollars it had stolen from the Post than going really digital when it could have and should have.

Politico came in vowing to “win the morning,” which, back in 2007, turned out to be a genuine competitive advantage in the still-sluggish, roll-in-at-10-take-a-long-lunch world of Washington journalism. With its get-it-up-now, web-first mentality and the round-the-clock updates that it featured on blogs like Ben Smith’s eponymous news feed, Politico was cutting edge at a moment when Facebook was still a hangout for college students and not their moms, Twitter was some trendy new West Coast thing, and BlackBerries were ubiquitous in the corridors of government.

Washington, a city where information has always been power, loved it. During and after the 2008 election, Barack Obama and his aides would bemoan the Politico -ization of Washington, while avidly reading every word of it. In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico ’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico ’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

Politics was never more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Through all these shakeups, I remained a big optimist about the disruption, believing that so many of the changes were for the good when it came to how we cover Washington. The general-interest mission of places like The Washington Post in its heyday had meant that the paper played a crucial role as a public commons and community gathering place—Don Graham loved the idea that there was something that bound together the bus driver in Prince George’s County, Maryland, with the patrician senator on Capitol Hill, and the brigadier general in the Pentagon, and so did I. But that very well-intentioned notion also translated into a journalism that was often broad without being sufficiently deep. We told amazing stories and went to the dark corners of the globe but we also took our audience for granted, and tended to act like monopolists everywhere, not infrequently mistaking entitlement for excellence.

In recent years, it seemed to me, we were moving beyond those constraints, blessed by the forces of technological innovation with great new tools for covering and presenting the news—and an incredible ability to get the word out about our stories more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than ever before. Most importantly, the constant new competition was serving to make our actual journalism better and better, and wasn’t that the point? I was sure that the story of the last few decades wasn’t really just about shiny new platforms and ever speedier news cycles, but about information and the value it could and should have for those who need to know what is really going on in Washington.

It’s true that there were other, more worrisome developments alongside this democratization of information and the means to report on it. While I was celebrating the new digital journalism, others worried, correctly, about the accompanying rise of a new world of partisan spin, hype, and punditry, not to mention the death of the business models that supported all that investigative journalism. And yet I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling. And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

As the 2016 election cycle started, I gave a speech to a journalism conference that was all about the glass being half full. “Forget the chestbeaters and the look-at-what’s-losters,” I said.

This is going to be a golden age for anyone who cares about journalism and access to new ideas and information. In a time of transformation, there are losers to be sure but winners too—why not aim to be on the side of what’s being created, not what’s being destroyed? Think about how to preserve the best of what we’ve inherited, along with the new ideas that will come from having dazzling new tools and capabilities we couldn’t have dreamed of just a few short news cycles ago.

I still think that.

But it’s hard not to have experienced The Trump Show and all that’s gone along with it without having some major new qualms.

Transparency—without accountability

At a few minutes after 4 p.m. on Friday, October 7, I was sitting in a conference room with Politico ’s top editors, deciding what stories to feature on our homepage when Blake Hounshell, our website’s editorial director, looked up from his laptop and gasped. Soon, we all heard why as Blake hit the play button on a video just posted on The Washington Post ’s website. There was Donald Trump’s voice, snide and belittling, bragging off-camera to an Access Hollywood reporter of his sexually aggressive behavior toward women in words so crude they’d never appeared before in any major news outlet.

It was clear to all of us in an instant that this was a game-changer, an accountability moment in a campaign sorely lacking them, and we editors were sure—as sure as we were about anything in politics—that Donald Trump would now face a reckoning for his misogynistic attitudes and questionable behavior toward women.

Clearly that reckoning never came. And in retrospect, perhaps we could have anticipated that it might not. Even as we sat gasping at the Access Hollywood video, I thought back to that day so long ago in the Post newsroom, when we journalists were convinced the revelation of the Starr investigation into Bill Clinton’s womanizing—and the lies he told to avoid responsibility for it—could spell the end of Clinton’s presidency. Within days, Trump was thinking of that moment too, and in the effort to deflect attention from his scandalous behavior toward women, he sought to resurrect Bill Clinton’s old misdeeds, parading several of the women from Clinton’s 1998 scandals before the cameras at his second presidential debate with Clinton’s wife. Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

Fake news is thriving

In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times .

Of course, that’s not how it seemed at the time. It’s hard to remember now, amid all the anguished self-examination after the shocking outcome of the election, but it was at least occasionally a great moment for journalism. If ever there were a campaign that called for aggressive reporting, this one did, and it produced terrific examples of investigative, public service-minded journalism at its best. In a way, it was even liberating to have a candidate so disdainful of the old rules as Donald Trump. With some of us banned for months from his rallies even as they were more extensively recorded by more participants than perhaps any political events in the history of the world (thanks, iPhone), we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past. Or about Hillary Clinton’s for that matter; her potential conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation, six-figure Wall Street speeches, and a secret email server were, in my view, rightfully scrutinized by the media. It’s just the kind of stuff we got into journalism to do.

And yet …

We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

While it’s true that fears about the fragmentation of the media, the destruction of our public commons, the commodification of the news, and the death of objective reporting have been around as long as I’ve been in Washington, politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth. Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source , Fox, for political information they trust. As President Obama has famously observed, “If I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either.” As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases. And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes— for an entire week . And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination. Not only that, when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes ! So much for truth: By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S. , and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim . So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

Main source for news about government and politics

At least in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed. Can we pluck anything out of the stream for longer than a brief moment? Can our readers?

As this wild presidential campaign progressed, that became my ever-more nagging worry and then our collective nightmare—the fear, clearly realized, that all the flood of news and information we’ve celebrated might somehow be drowning us. So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

But 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

And that for my money is by far the most dispiriting thing about this campaign season: not the mind-numbing endless chatter or the embarrassing bottom-feeding coverage or even the stone-throwing barbarians lying in wait to attack any who dare to enter Twitter or Facebook.

So what’s an editor with a no longer always half-full glass to do?

Four days after the election, I moved to Jerusalem to become a foreign correspondent again for a few years. To a troubled part of the world where the stones thrown are real and not metaphorical. Where an entire region is in the midst of a grand and violent reckoning with the fallout of a failed political order. And where, not coincidentally, the results of the election this year in the world’s remaining superpower will matter almost as much as they will back in Washington.

Facts may be dead, but here’s one I’ll take with me, and it’s a truth as rock-solid as those Facebook feeds are not: elections, in America or elsewhere, still have consequences.

Susan B. Glasser served as editor of Politico throughout the 2016 campaign. The founding editor of Politico Magazine , she has also been editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine; a foreign correspondent, editor, and political reporter for The Washington Post ; and co-chief of the Post ’s Moscow Bureau with her husband, Peter Baker. Their book, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution , was published in 2005. Prior to the Post , Glasser worked for eight years at Roll Call , where she rose from an intern to become the paper’s top editor.

Now more than ever, facts and research matter. Sign up to get our best ideas of the day in your inbox.

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In Search Of Truth

Part iv: are we living in a post-truth world, copy the code below to embed the wbur audio player on your site.

<iframe width="100%" height="124" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://player.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/02/27/part-iv-post-truth"></iframe>

• Hilary McQuilkin
• Meghna Chakrabarti

This series is produced in collaboration with  The Conversation . 

From an endless stream of political misinformation to inescapable lies on social media, are we living in a post-truth world?

Lee McIntyre , fellow at Boston University's Center for Philosophy and History of Science. Author of " Post-Truth ." ( @LeeCMcIntyre )

Christopher  Beem , managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. ( @McCourtneyInst )

Interview Highlights

When we say post-truth, what do you think that means?

Lee McIntyre : “It’s easy to have a misconception about what post-truth means. And to say that we live in a post-truth era doesn't mean that truth doesn't matter anymore, or that no one cares about truth. It means that we live in an era where truth is at risk, where we're in danger of losing sight of what truth means. In my book, I define post-truth as the political subordination of reality. So I think of post-truth as a tactic that's used by authoritarians and their wannabes to control the flow of information so that they can then control the populace. It's intended not just to corrupt our belief in some specific thing that's true, but really to undermine the idea that we can know truth outside of political context.”

"I think of post-truth as a tactic that's used by authoritarians and their wannabes to control the flow of information so that they can then control the populace." Lee McIntyre

What's different now?

Lee McIntyre : “It's a great question, because the roots of this have been around forever. Politicians have lied. There have been, you know, enormous lies, enormous political subordination of reality, if you will: the Holocaust, American slavery. I mean, you just go back in history. It's always existed. What's different now? And I think the reason that the Oxford Dictionary named ‘post-truth’ their word of the year in 2016, is that this seems new in the following sense.

"The extreme political partisanship, married to the social media, married to how quickly misinformation and disinformation can get out there, I think makes this sort of a unique challenge of our time. It's sort of a pandemic, if you will, of disinformation and misinformation that is new. So maybe the … roots that I explore in the book ‘Post-Truth’ have been there for a long time. But we're now facing something that I think is a unique threat. And it's new, at least in the American experiment. Here we are."

What can we do to fix a post-truth society?

Christopher Beem : “Well, you know, democracy is hard. It requires things of you that are unnatural. It requires you to be passionate and yet temperate. It requires you to accept the idea that this person with whom you disagree vehemently has as much right to their opinion, and as much right to express it as you do. And the other thing it requires of you is a commitment to reflect your perspectives accurately, honestly. And it means hearing things or being concerned about the world as it is, rather than the world as you want it to be. None of these things are easy.

"And the only thing I can tell you is that in a democracy, we are all responsible. We are all sovereign. It's not any one person's job to run it. It's all of ours. And so that means we all just have to commit to some things that are hard. And the truth is hard. Our biases push us in directions that make us disinclined to listen to things we don't agree with; the things we don't like. And so it's only through a kind of personal commitment to the truth that any of this can be undone. And there's so many things pushing us the other way right now.”

"In a democracy, we are all responsible. We are all sovereign. It's not any one person's job to run it. It's all of ours. And so that means we all just have to commit to some things that are hard. And the truth is hard." Christopher Beem

How do we make our democracy work now? 

Christopher Beem : “Well, I actually listen to a lot of my students ask the same thing. And ... I did a TED Talk where I said one of things we need to do is to join something. Not political, but just anything that brings people together in service of some common interests, some common objective. So I said, you know, ‘Listen, if you're a Penn State student, if you want to do ultimate or, you know, I heard that Penn State has a beekeeping club. It doesn't matter. If you get together with people who are different from you and you don't interact with them in terms of some kind of, you know, this is my name online and where there's no accountability, but you actually interact with people face to face, it is much easier to come to understand that we're very similar. In terms of what our objectives are for ourselves and our family and what we want out of the world.'

"And it's much harder to hate each other, right? Because you come to see this person as being just like you ... feet of clay, doing the best they can and not want to hurt anybody. And so I think that is one way out: is to find those opportunities. They’re out there. And my colleague is in a community band. And, you know, she says, ‘Well, we just don't talk about.’ But, you know, ‘I know that if something happens, there's going to be 20 hot dishes.’ You know, there will be food. So that's one place to start. Is just to kind of connect with people outside of politics.”

From The Reading List

Excerpt from "post-truth" by lee mcintyre.

Excerpted from "Post-Truth." Copyright © 2018 by Lee McIntyre. Excerpted with permission from MIT Press, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Conversation : " Lies, damn lies and post-truth " — "Even if we could find some isolated example of a politician who was scrupulously honest – former President Jimmy Carter, perhaps – the question is how to think about the rest of them. And if most politicians lie, then why are some Americans so hard on President Donald Trump?

"According to The Washington Post, Trump has told 6,420 lies so far in his presidency. In the seven weeks leading up to the midterms, his rate increased to 30 per day. That’s a lot, but isn’t this a difference in degree and not a difference in kind with other politicians?

"From my perspective as a philosopher who studies truth and belief, it doesn’t seem so. And even if most politicians lie, that doesn’t make all lying equal. Yet the difference in Trump’s prevarication seems to be found not in the quantity or enormity of his lies, but in the way that Trump uses his lies in service to a proto-authoritarian political ideology."

The Conversation : " 'Is truth overrated?' What the experts say " — "Last month, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker published an updated accounting of all the false and misleading claims made by President Donald Trump since he assumed office: 1,057: an average of five per day.

"That is, to be sure, a big number. But does it really matter? George Orwell famously said, 'political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.' Orwell speaks for most of us: To be a politician is to lie. And therefore many will ask: Five times a day, or 25 – What difference, really, does it make?

"Hannah Arendt was a political philosopher and a Jew who escaped Hitler’s Germany and settled in New York. In her essay, 'Truth and Politics,' she asked this very question. She argued that democratic society requires that we agree on two things. First, that there are such things as facts. And second, that we should strive to present those facts as best we understand them. In other words, we should try to tell the truth.

"Why? Because the more a politician – like the president, for example – fails to live up to these agreements, the more difficult it becomes for the rest of us to agree with, dispute or even assess what he says. When this happens, debate becomes increasingly pointless. And at some point, democracy itself is imperiled."

This program aired on February 27, 2020.

• Part I: The History Of How We Think About Truth
• Part II: The Science Behind How We Perceive Truth
• Part III: How The Powerful Manipulate Truth

Hilary McQuilkin Producer, On Point Hilary McQuilkin is a producer for On Point.

Meghna Chakrabarti Host, On Point Meghna Chakrabarti is the host of On Point.

More from On Point

Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society

From fake news, datafication and mass surveillance to the death of trust, table of contents, introduction to media, technology and education in a post-truth society introduction.

This collection of essays has its roots in a collective desire to understand the workings of the post-truth society, and how education, media and technology may contribute to mitigating its worst excesses. This chapter introduces the origins of the book project.

Part 1 Repurposing Education for the Post-truth Society

Post-truth society: toward a dialogical understanding of truth.

The post-truth moment comes at a time of deference for epistemic authority, which has serious implications for democracy. If democracy implies an epistemology, attempting to live a democratic way of life implies a theory about the nature of knowledge among other theoretical aspects (e.g. political and ethical). At the time of ‘fluid modernity’, the post-truth politics of renouncing truth damages the foundations of democracy, for how could we proceed with a democratic way of life without truth as a common denominator for deliberation? While a defining feature of the post-truth era is its intrinsic relativism, Gellner (2013) warns this could lead to ‘cognitive nihilism’. Thus, it is imperative to (i) find our way back to reasonableness (based on both reason and emotions) based on a Freirean dialogic middle ground, instead of renouncing truth (that is any notion of truth), and (ii) critically discuss possibilities for various approaches to truth-seeking. While it is important to question the foundation and reasonableness of truth, two crucial issues arise: which theory of knowledge and whose theory of knowledge should be accepted as the epistemological basis of truth? Moreover, this chapter will argue that a more plausible notion of truth is neither one that is based on intrinsic objectivity nor intrinsic relativism, but one that is based on the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity; that is a relational (nor relative) and dialectic understanding of truth which does not rule out the existence of facts but questions the political constructs of facts. The final section of the chapter focuses on the application of the understanding of truth as a relational dialogical epistemology. While arguing for a dialogical theory of truth, the chapter also problematizes the predominant view of evidence-based research and policy and offers an in-depth discussion of how our understanding of the relational dialogical notion of truth can be utilized in the analysis of cases involving pro-active discrimination and affirmative action.

Macroauthorities and Microliteracies: The New Terrain of Information Politics

A continuum model helps us understand contemporary information politics. One end describes authority-centric approaches, including governments and digital corporations, while the other focuses on teaching individual skills and the understanding needed to grapple productively with the digital information ecosystem. The extremes represent opposed views of human agency, current information enterprises, and the nature of media. We apply this continuum to two examples, QAnon and COVID-19. Two instances attempt to connect the model's two poles. We conclude with a forecast of the continuum's viability and then project its application forward in education.

The Learning Challenge in the Twenty-first Century *

Truth matters; and the norms associated with a democratic society, such as the common good, responsibility, ethics, and civic engagement, are under attack with the emergence of the post-truth society. There are concerns worldwide that public education is failing us on pushing back on disinformation. Schools are not seen as developing skills that permit students to adequately differentiate truth from nontruths. In this context, the education system also faces some unprecedented challenges. The quality of education in most of the world is low, and only slowly improving. Also, future workers are concerned with automation's threat – or perceived threat – to jobs. In most countries, education systems are not providing workers with the skills necessary to compete in today's job markets. The growing mismatch between demand and supply of skills holds back economic growth and undermines opportunity. At the same time, the financial returns to schooling are high in most countries, and growing skill premiums are evident in much of the world. Schooling remains a good economic and social investment, and there are record numbers of children in school today. The skills that matter in the coming technological revolution are likely the same as what is needed in a media environment of disinformation. More and better education, and noncognitive skills, will not only prepare students for the future world of work; they will also prepare them to navigate the increasingly complex post-truth society. They will be able to detect fake news – or deliberate disinformation spread through news or online media. It will also allow young people to gain trust. In other words, better education is democratizing, to the extent that it promotes truth, values, and civic engagement.

The Pretruth Era in MENA, News Ecology, and Critical News Literacy

The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region is in a critical moment in its information and news ecology, exhibiting signs of pretruth and posttruth syndromes. Between the “pretruth” and “posttruth” there is a gap that circumvented “truth.” The state of information in the MENA region brings back the dystopian Orwellian notion of the “Ministry of Truth.” A poetic term in anticipation of this moment of the crisis of truth. Sharing the latter with the rest of the world, the pretruth moment is engraved in the region's history of precarious political and religious authoritarian control and manipulation of information and news and low press freedom. In the region, truth is told, hidden, distorted, and manufactured by a blend of humans and bots, where both artificial intelligence and social humans are involved in this process of multipolarized disinformation operations with multifarious sponsors, actors, and beneficiaries that have distinct and often clashing agendas and interests. To understand the ecology of truth, facts, news, and information in the Middle East, studies ought to be situated within the ecosystem of information and media technologies in the globalized national and transnational societies of the region and consider both the role of the regionally oriented neoauthoritarian regimes and that of interested rising and established global powers. Central to this ecosystem is the dynamic interaction among three actors: communication technologies (the focus here is on the Internet); media, public, and activists' use of these technologies to mobilize, inform, and present alternative narratives, and to resist or confirm state narratives; and the authoritarian political regimes and their containment strategies for legacy media (particularly television) and the Internet.

Critical Literacy Is at the Heart of the Answer

2019 was a big year. The Great Hack and investigative journalism of Carole Cadwalladr exposed the machinations of Cambridge Analytica. The US senate summoned Mark Zuckerberg to face an extended interrogation on the ways in which Facebook screens content. Greta Thunberg fomented a global ‘climate emergency’ movement with attacks on lying political leaders. If 2016 saw ‘post-truth’ rise to prominence as a concept, 2019 was characterised by myriad efforts to champion truth and counter misinformation. And then the COVID-19 crisis hit. The urgency we began to feel in 2019 to address the ills in our society and hunt for a cause and cure has intensified. We now daily ask at whose door we can lay the blame and, from there, what solutions we can implement. For now, we have drawn the battle lines between tech and society and looked to pit governments against technologies which have changed the face of media. But amidst this flurry of activity, we need to stop and ask ourselves: are we setting our sights on the right actors and are we taking the right next steps?

Written in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this contribution responds to the burning debate on how to overcome our current infodemic and immunise against future outbreaks. It offers an alternative narrative and argues for a much more radical course of action. It posits that we have misidentified the root cause of our current post-truth reality. It argues that we are in fact experiencing the extreme consequence of decades of poor education the world over. It champions a shift from drilling young people in so-called facts and figures to developing those deep levels of literacy in which critical thinking plays a fundamental part. This is not to exculpate the Facebooks and Twitters of our time – new tech has no doubt facilitated the dissemination of half-truths and untruths. But it is to insist upon contextualising our current albeit horrifying reality within a much more complex and longer-running societal challenge. In other words, this chapter makes a fresh clarion call for rethinking how we have got to where we are and where we might most meaningfully go next, as well as how, indeed, we might conceptualise the links between technology, government, media and education.

Societal Reorientation via Programmable Trust: A Case for Piloting New Models of Open Governance in Education

This essay proposes the need to infuse o pen innovation (OI) and open source (OS) principles and technologies into schools as a means of tackling many of the most pervasive challenges in education, and by extension, society at large. It is argued that the principles of OI and OS, which are rooted in innovation management and software development, respectively, may be applied to the way we conceive of and approach organizational governance structures related to schooling, particularly in regard to harnessing innovation, updating management processes, and codifying new systems of trust. Whereas OI offers a novel approach to knowledge flow and the open exchange of ideas, communities rooted in OS principles breed tangible and generative effects through peer network democratization. These emergent, digitally defined networks have been proven to maximize innovation potential, expand collaboration, and enable the propagation of highly durable systems of trust and transparency, all catalytic and essential if we are to realize a future learning economy which favors equity, distributed systems, and common goods over profit, centralized decision-making, and proprietorship. It is within this framing that we articulate the core tenets of both OI and OS translationally as a means of stimulating thinking about how core principles of “openness” and the distributed technologies they enable may help to build common ground in an ever-evolving education and information ecosystem.

Part 2 Repurposing Media for the Post-truth Society

Fact to fake: the media world as it was and is today *.

This chapter explores responsibility in the posttruth era in communication disciplines while documenting the civic and political ramifications of the current news climate in the United States.

Post-news Journalism in the Post-Enlightenment Era

News, as one of many forms of newspaper output, has long been synonymous with journalism. The “crisis of journalism” is primarily a crisis of the news as a cultural form. Drawing on Carey (2008) , this chapter argues that news has lost its monopoly as a source of global experience and everyday drama, and, thus, has lost its commodity value. The decline of traditional forms of news is transforming journalism, and its democratic function as vehicle of public conversation, toward long-form, long-term, and affective narratives.

How Can Wikipedia Save Us all?: Assuming Good Faith from all Points of View in the Age of Fake News and Post-truth

The world's most popular noncommercial website is built on five pillars, which include an assumption of good faith and ensuring all points of view are included in every encyclopedia article. How does this pan out in the day-to-day reality of fake news and the ever-growing climate of post-truth? How apt are mechanisms established by Wikipedia over a decade ago in the face of unreliable news sources and beliefs based on gut feelings and emotions rather than verifiable evidence? Active editors of Wikipedia firmly believe that this open online encyclopedia and other wikis operating under the same value system are lifeboats for truth seekers in a post-truth society. The mechanisms established over many years for sharing open knowledge through this online platform are even more useful now than they may have been in previous times, even though this too is understandably debatable.

Public Rebuttal, Reflection and Responsibility. Or an Inconvenient Answer to Fake News

Information may well be an asset, but the sheer volume of what we have to navigate makes it challenging to determine those elements which are relevant to us. The credibility of news media outlets as our gatekeepers and first form of resistance to polluted information is increasingly questioned. Scientific research indicates that the quality of news offerings from news media outlets would benefit by triangulating news stories with a more diverse set of offerings and, in the process, build journalists' trust or otherwise in the sources of these offerings. Without the network effects of the Internet, false or incorrect information probably would not be such a successful phenomenon. Public opinion is quick to portray social or mainstream media platforms as guilty parties but tends to ignore the equally detrimental ramifications of their exploitation of social capital. A more reflective approach is required. This essay suggests that it is in our interest to reboot our societal consciousness and explore the underlying cybernetical dimensions, even if these appear to be confrontational for interested stakeholders in our current misinformation crisis.

The Kony 2012 Campaign: A Milestone of Visual Storytelling for Social Engagement

Images had long conveyed politics through forms as varied as private paintings and public coins. If images are storytelling vectors ( Fusari, 2017 ), visual artefacts were intended to re/shape human perception of current events and, consequently, their states of ‘being in the world’ ( Heidegger, 2001 ); this is the reason why the visual quality of communication might be hard to disjoin from that of ‘performativity’ ( Cartier-Bresson, 2018 ).

The polysemic ( Barthes, 1977 ), if not fully open ( Eco, 1989 ), quality of visual semiotics complicates identification of any framework of reference and adds to the need for practical and sensible research in digital communication ( Fusari, in press ).

Since the first US Presidential debate televised in 1968, a new interest surged towards the understanding and production of visual communication of politics. Increasingly so, images (both still and moving ones) have affected, if not thoroughly shaped, understanding of all recent political affairs, particularly so from the 1992's Gulf War onward ( Baudrillard, 1995 ; Kellner, 1992 ).

The 2012 Invisible Children (IC)'s campaign is here assessed as the milestone marking the potential for global impact acquired by socio-political visual-centred storytelling.

The intertwining of the digital with the visual has yet to be precisely arranged for socio-political storytelling; also, storytelling as a format and approach has increasingly gained relevance, adding new concerns to issues of veracity.

In response, this chapter advances the notion of ‘storyline’ in conjunction with that of ‘storytelling’: the resulting taxonomy aims to review specific notions of truth- and trust-fulness from a visual-centred perspective.

The chapter thus explores the requirements for communicating and understanding visual storytelling on digital media; by doing so, it addresses the extent to which ‘visual storytelling’ might be a notion fit for the job of disseminating today's digital cultures.

Eventually, the chapter will question how to design visually centred communication formats and, in turn, engage these as storytelling of socio-political issues for digital platforms.

Post-truth Visuals, Untruth Visuals

This chapter seeks to present a limited overview of some aspects of manipulated and/or fake images that contribute to society ‘becoming post-truth’. It subclassifies levels of manipulation and also presents the finding from a descriptive survey that gauges perceptions on awareness and recognisability of fake images. It also presents perceptions of effect on individuals of images modified for aesthetic reasons and carried by social media. The majority of respondents seemed affected by this, but with only a minority whose perception of self was affected. Another result of the survey is that there is a general mistrust of images not carried by gatekept sources.

Reflections on the Visual Truth and War Photography: A Historian's Perspective

In order to discuss visual truth both from the epistemological and ethical perspective, this essay focuses on the nature of photographic image and its complex relationship with human perception and ethics in Western culture. It argues that this relationship is similarly complex to that of history and reality it represents and points out that the ethical approach to truth is most constructive for society. By looking at the most politically, ethically, and ideologically engaged category: war photography, the author analyzes how images are constructed and used in various contexts. The text provides a background of history of war iconography but focuses on the examples from the twentieth and twenty-first century: the Vietnam War, the Balkan conflict, the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in Iraq, and the war in Syria.

It Is Time for Journalists to Save Journalism

The current environment of misinformation is causing expensive and negative consequences for society. Fake news is affecting democracy and its foundations, as well as newspapers and media companies that aim to combat this “pandemic.” In order to effectively provide accurate information, these companies are in need of a workforce with specific attitudes, skills, and knowledge (ASK). However, several studies show that students either do not have those ASK or have poorly developed them, indicating the need for better media literacy skills. Given that such skills are often not taught in school, nor is there a way for students to efficiently obtain them and tangibly show them to future employers, we propose a model 1 that enhances the way students learn and how we measure such learning. Journalism students – enrolled in liberal arts, general studies, and humanities – have the potential to be upskilled and become the new critical thinking and fact-checking force needed to neutralize misinformation and foster a healthy society. Our model applies learning science and behavioral research on feedback and intrinsic motivation to foster students' ASK through a digital apprenticeship model that uses structured activities together with mentorship and feedback. Students participate in the creation of digital products for the journalism and news media industry. This prepares them for the types of tasks they will be required to perform in the job market. The digital apprenticeship matches students with the proper mentor, peer, and professional network. Students' work is compared against professional news media production to generate feedback, improve quality, and track progress. During the digital apprenticeship, students receive the ASK- SkillsCredit, a digital badge, which serves as a “nutritional” fact label that displays how students created the media content, the level of efficacy of the apprenticeship, and the standard of journalism quality of the piece. Lastly, we propose to enhance existing learning management systems to capture and promote a learner's profile data and expose aligned opportunities in news media outlets.

Part 3 Future-proofing for the Post-truth Society

Karl marx and the blockchain.

Blockchain is often presented as a technological development; however, clearly it is not only that: the ‘Blockchain buzz’ exists in the context of current social and political developments. In this essay, we analyse blockchain technology and its social and political context from a perspective of Marxist economic theory. Since arguably the last great inflection point in society and technology was analysed by Marx in terms of labour and capital and since we seem to be experiencing a shift in the balance between these forces today, it makes sense to revisit the Marxist ideas and apply them to the current situation, to see how well they still apply and if necessary to update them for current events.

Two Sides to Every Story. The Truth, Post-truth, and the Blockchain Truth

One of the rallying cries of the blockchain community is that of immutability: the irreversibility of the past, the absolute truth which, once stored, remains there forever. The technology was designed with this foundational pillar in mind to ensure that changes to history are inordinately expensive and practically impossible to execute – and increasingly so, the further in the past the event which one intends to manipulate lies. This platonic view of absolute truth is in stark contrast with a world of manipulated truth, and it is not surprising that it is being revisited as a means of combating fake news. We argue that claims to the absolute nature of the blockchain are at best exaggerated, at worst misrepresented or even ‘fake news’. We discuss implicit centralised points of trust in blockchains, whether at a technological, social or governance level, and identify how these can be a threat to the ‘immutable truth’ stored within the blockchain itself. A global pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented wave of contradictory positions on anything from vaccines and face masks to ‘the new normal’. It is only natural that the pursuit of blockchain as a placebo for society's ‘truth’ problems continues.

Decentralised Verification Technologies and the Web

The Internet, the Web and social media have radically transformed a number of core pillars of our social fabric. The way billions of citizens work, interact and socialise is underpinned by our global network infrastructure. Unfortunately, we have also seen a number of negative effects from this transformation. As has been widely publicised, undesirable impacts include the spread of disinformation and fake news; attacks on democratic elections and the ‘weaponisation’ of personal data. This article describes some of the technological approaches that are being taken to address some of the above issues. At the core of these technologies are notions around decentralisation. With blockchains it is possible that citizens can create their own ‘self-sovereign’ identity – the digital equivalent of writing one's name onto a piece of paper – and acquiring verification through blockchain-based techniques. An approach to alleviating the ‘weaponisation’ of personal and sensitive data is to give citizens their own data store. Initiatives such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Solid allow users to store, manage and control their own data according to any personal preferences or constraints. We believe that a combination of personal data stores and blockchains will lead to a new type of resilient communication and collaboration mechanism, whereby personal rights and empowerment are enhanced and transparency at the community level is integral.

How Do We Know What Is True?

What is truth and what are the conditions for its manifestation? We can induce from the evidence of the experience of all human subjects capable of communication and intersubjective behavior that we exist in a world that (1) we share and (2) is accessible to all of us. From this, we can infer that the experience of truth is not merely subjective, but depends upon objective referents to be meaningful. The interplay of subjectivity and objectivity in the meaning-making processes of human subjects is the condition of possibility for truth.

This essay proposes two ways of pursuing truth. One is a scientific project that requires generations of rigorous study and collective building. The other is a simple set of guidelines that can be used day to day by anyone. Both are important. Not everyone will be a professional scientist, but everyone can use simple scientific tools to bring their thinking and actions more in line with truth.

Social Technologies and Their Unplanned Obsolescence

Social Technologies and their Unplanned Obsolescence seeks to sidestep the various contents of the post-truth debate to consider the manner in which any body of knowledge and practice gets taken up and extended at all. This bottom-up consideration of the material conditions of bodies of knowledge and practice is presented polemically, as a critical homily of sorts, and is concluded with a forward-looking call to action.

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• Published: 28 November 2016

Post-truth: a guide for the perplexed

• Kathleen Higgins 1  

Nature volume  540 ,  page 9 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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• Communication

If politicians can lie without condemnation, what are scientists to do? Kathleen Higgins offers some explanation.

The Oxford Dictionaries named ‘post-truth’ as their 2016 Word of the Year. It must sound alien to scientists. Science’s quest for knowledge about reality presupposes the importance of truth, both as an end in itself and as a means of resolving problems. How could truth become passé?

For philosophers like me, post-truth also goes against the grain. But in the wake of the US presidential election and the seemingly endless campaigns preceding it, author Ralph Keyes’s 2004 declaration that we have arrived in a post-truth era seems distressingly plausible.

Post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society, and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation. This is different from the cliché that all politicians lie and make promises they have no intention of keeping — this still expects honesty to be the default position. In a post-truth world, this expectation no longer holds.

This can explain the current political situation in the United States and elsewhere. Public tolerance of inaccurate and undefended allegations, non sequiturs in response to hard questions and outright denials of facts is shockingly high. Repetition of talking points passes for political discussion, and serious interest in issues and options is treated as the idiosyncrasy of wonks. The lack of public indignation when political figures claim disbelief in response to scientific consensus on climate change is part of this larger pattern. ‘Don’t bother me with facts’ is no longer a punchline. It has become a political stance. It’s worth remembering that it has not always been this way: the exposure of former US president Richard Nixon’s lies was greeted with outrage.

One might be tempted to blame philosophy for post-truth. Some of us write about epistemic relativism, the view that truth can vary depending on the context. Yet relativism is itself relative. An extreme relativist might hold that the truth varies from person to person, a position that does not leave much room for debate. But more rational positions can also involve at least a modicum of relativism. In a sense, even eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s quite sensible contention that we can never know what things are like ‘in themselves’ — independent of how our minds format what we perceive — is a relativistic position. It implies that what is true of the world for humans is probably different from what is true for a fly. Entomologists would surely agree.

Political leaders take their right to lie as a given, perhaps particularly when the lies are transparent.

More radical forms of relativism are often denounced as under­mining basic values. Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century phil­osopher who is often invoked to justify post-truth, was such a relativist, and he does suggest at times that deception is rife and should not be cat­egorically rejected. His point is to complicate our view of human behaviour and to object to moral certainties that encourage black-and-white judgements about what’s good and what’s evil. Thus he denies that there are moral facts, saying that we have only “moral interpretations”, and in doing so denies that moral assertions are unconditionally true. But this does not mean there is no truth. Even when he claims that our truths amount to our “irrefutable errors”, he is pointing to the exaggerated clarity of abstractions by comparison with empirical reality.

In fact — contrary to how he is often presented — Nietzsche held intellectual honesty at a premium. His most strenuous rejections of ‘truth’ are mostly directed not at truth, but at what has been asserted as true. Yes, Nietzsche was an elitist who was sceptical of democracy, and so his work does not necessarily fault leaders for talking down to the public. But it also points out the inconsistency of religious teachers who assume they have the right to lie.

When political leaders make no effort to ensure that their ‘facts’ will bear scrutiny, we can only conclude that they take an arrogant view of the public. They take their right to lie as given, perhaps particularly when the lies are transparent. Many among the electorate seem not to register the contempt involved, perhaps because they would like to think that their favoured candidate is at least well-intentioned and would not deliberately mislead them.

Much of the public hears what it wants to hear, because many people get their news exclusively from sources whose bias they agree with. But contemptuous leaders and voters who are content with hand-waving and entertaining bluster undermine the democratic idea of rule by the people. The irony is that politicians who benefit from post-truth tendencies rely on truth, too, but not because they adhere to it. They depend on most people’s good-natured tendency to trust that others are telling the truth, at least the vast majority of the time.

Scientists and philosophers should be shocked by the idea of post-truth, and they should speak up when scientific findings are ignored by those in power or treated as mere matters of faith. Scientists must keep reminding society of the importance of the social mission of science — to provide the best information possible as the basis for public policy. And they should publicly affirm the intellectual virtues that they so effectively model: critical thinking, sustained inquiry and revision of beliefs on the basis of evidence. Another line from Nietzsche is especially pertinent now: “Three cheers for physics! — and even more for the motive that spurs us toward physics — our honesty!”

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Post-truthism: An Era or an Intellectual Strategy?

• First Online: 19 March 2022

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The POTUS-45 era in the United States gave us the latest and most virulent forms of alternative facts, and distrust of science and the media. Rational scepticism morphed into irrational scepticism, rational freedom from unbridled authority morphed into an irrational defence of absolute individual freedom. This has been fuelled by the myth of individualism and post-truth agendas. Post-truthism is not new. It was characteristic of political and media practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “pamphlet wars” of the 1600s, and is associated with the aftermath of the routinization of rationalities throughout history. Out of control “information” systems centred on the Internet have given it new life. Specifically, America’s anti-intellectual tradition nourishes “fake news” and anti-science. The author answers the classical question, “What is to be done?”

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Home Issues 15-1 Is Truth to Post-Truth what Moder...

Is Truth to Post-Truth what Modernism Is to Postmodernism? Heidegger, the Humanities, and the Demise of Common-Sense

This essay argues that there is no such thing as post-truth. We are by no means in the middle of an unprecedented epistemological crisis that keeps us from telling right from wrong. Rather, what we currently witness is a major breakdown of the institutions and mechanics of democratic society, triggered by an encompassing technological transformation that affects both our public and private lives. Even if the challenges for rational public discourse are real, they should not be countered by philosophy but by concerted, serious interventions in the political arena. This essay’s approach to the issue of post-truth, therefore, is threefold: First, it looks at how most of us in the West have come to agree on certain truths about truth. Second, since the notion of post-truth is often invoked to expose someone who fails to speak the truth (rather than to demote the concept of truth altogether), it refers to the Greek tradition of  parrhesia  as discussed by the late Michel Foucault. And thirdly, this essay comment s on the alarming rise of anti-professionalism. Long before neoconservatives waged war on the university, the erosion of expertise has been fostered, according to Bruno Latour, by forces unleashed within the humanities itself. Yet there is little evidence, this essays concludes, that humanist critical thinking is driving the current post-truth crisis and that postmodernist efforts to rethink and question modernist forms of critique should be undone altogether.

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Keywords: .

1 Truth or post-truth? For most readers, the question raised in the title of this collection conveys a sense of uneasiness about the current state of affairs—political, social, cultural—in that it juxtaposes two mutually exclusive world views: one based on facts and on largely reliable representations of these facts, and another that posits a post-factual world full of fake news and disinformation in which rivaling versions of reality are in ongoing competition. It also asks us to choose between these two worlds, as if we still had a choice, and both the world of truth and the world of post-truth were equally available to us, either to be nurtured or rejected. What if, however, the collocation of these two possible worlds is but a false proposition, not unlike asking: modernism or postmodernism? Since the “post” in postmodernism evokes an irredeemable lapse of time, a transformation that has already taken place, it can hardly be reversed. In other words, there is no going back to modernism (or truth, for that matter) if you believe that such a thing as postmodernism (or post-truth) really exists. You may prefer the former, but history will not let you choose between the two, modernism will always remain—even if preferred over its later, distorted twin—an option that is no longer an option.

2 To consider post-truth an adequate description of our own time suggests an equally irreversible transformation of society, the change from a previous, bygone era of truth to a contemporary social and cultural environment predicated on alternative notions of truth, such as “fake news,” “alternative facts,” or my personal favorite “truthiness,” a fake word invented by the comedian Stephen Colbert who parodied cable news talk shows on his own, now discontinued cable show The Colbert Report . Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that at an earlier stage of modern society, truth once reigned supreme. We would then have to explain how the new paradigm of post-truth has finally come to prevail and, perhaps more importantly, why we think that truth is a socially desirable good that should be embraced and—if now lost—somehow recuperated. In so doing, we should also ask to what extent the notion of post-truth is substantially different or at least substantially distinct from previous experiences of truth, both individual and collective. Moreover, there is the issue of a possible causality, as in: does post-truth follow from truth as postmodernism follows from modernism? If the answer is “yes,” then any attempt to retrieve some of the values associated with the era of truth, such as veracity, accountability, authenticity, etc., would be all but futile. If, on the other hand, the causal relations between these two historical moments turn out to be rather weak, social remedies for the current transformation of society and its negative consequences seem much less far-fetched. Finally, whether we worry about the watering down of the notion of truth or whether we embrace post-truth as our new reality, we should be altogether wary of mingling abstract philosophical ideas with matters of politics and cultural change. To ask about truth or post-truth is not the same as asking: what do and what can we know about the world as it appears to us?—issues philosophers have been struggling with for centuries. What is frequently lacking in current debates on the specters of a post-truth society are efforts to re-envision the social contract underlying all modern democratic societies. For any successful participatory involvement in political action not only requires fundamental democratic rights such as the freedom of speech; it also turns on a shared understanding of the ultimate goals of politics and, equally important, on a meaningful public conversation about the ways and means by which to achieve these goals.

3 In what follows, I argue that there is no such thing as post-truth. We are by no means in the middle of an unprecedented epistemological crisis that keeps us from telling right from wrong. Rather, what we are currently witnessing is a major breakdown of the institutions and mechanisms of democratic society, triggered by an encompassing technological transformation that affects both our public and our private lives. True, in its wake, truth claims have become increasingly contested and way more difficult to uphold. Even if the challenges for rational public discourse are real, however, they should not be countered by philosophy but by concerted, serious interventions into political processes. My approach to the issue of post-truth, therefore, is threefold: first, I look at how most of us in “the West” have come to agree on certain truths about truth. As Martin Heidegger observed, our understanding of truth has often been too narrowly focused on the correspondence between a statement and an object that is deemed immutable and fixed. In a crucial passage of Being and Time Heidegger instead posits an inextricable linkage between truth and un -truth, neither of which could be completely separated from the other nor used interchangeably. And since the notion of post-truth is often invoked to expose someone who fails to speak the truth (rather than to demote the concept of truth as such), I also consider the Greek tradition of parrhesia , as discussed by the late Michel Foucault. Here, I am particularly interested in the role of “truth-speaking” as a form of critique, a rhetorical tool to positively intervene in social and political discourses.

• 1 Cf. Lane and Riordan, “Trump’s Disdain for Science;” Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? Fr (...)

4 Second, I briefly comment on a recent cultural phenomenon, the alarming rise of anti-professionalism, which for many is closely connected to the unlimited availability of professional knowledge online. As I argue, anti-professional, anti-elitist sentiments coupled with an increasing distrust in academic expertise have paved the way for an allegedly post-factual world and, ultimately, have nibbled away at the authority of professionals and experts altogether. Long before Donald Trump waged war on the university, the erosion of expertise, according to a remarkably prescient 2004 essay by Bruno Latour, has been fostered—at least in part—by forces unleashed within the humanities and other fields of academic inquiry itself. 1 The causes that drove this development are manifold, and it is not clear yet to what degree the humanities have actually been implicated in their own downfall. That right-wing political strategists such as Steve Bannon have used critical jargon to “deconstruct” the notion of government as we knew it, is indeed puzzling. Yet there is little evidence that humanist critical thinking is at the core of the current post-truth crisis, and that postmodernist efforts to rethink and question modernist forms of critique should be undone altogether.

5 And, finally, politics: In conclusion to my admittedly haphazard remarks on truth and post-truth, I ask, how could we possibly remedy the widespread disregard for public institutions, the demise of common sense, and the shattering of political dialogue, all three salient markers of our own, so-called post-truth era? Far from being an epistemological crisis, the current cultural transformation, I want to suggest, has already called forth far-reaching social and political consequences that need to be addressed. To hold the negative repercussions of cultural and technological change in check, salvage meaningful political dialogue in a largely digital, privatized media environment, in short, to make a strong case for truth-speaking as a form of critique and meaningful participation in politics, scholars in the humanities—their dwindling cultural authority notwithstanding—must weigh in on the issue at hand. If we agree that truth, as William James put it, “is made , just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience” (104), then not only is it imperative that as many as possible participate in the process of truth-making, but that they do so responsibly.

1. Telling the Truth

6 As Italian media theorist Chiara Cappelletto recently noted, there is a long prehistory to the current debate about truth and post-truth. In a paper delivered at a 2017 LMU graduate conference on “Alternative Facts: Between Fact, Fiction, and Politics,” Cappelletto emphasized that “the idea of an impersonal truth based on factual data is relatively recent in Western culture” (2). In classical oratory and rhetoric, for example, the factitiousness of an experience largely depended on the persuasive power of the orator who strives to present an argument in such a way that it appeared both rational and factual. Moreover, issues of truth cut across a wide variety of disciplines, such as epistemology, language philosophy, rhetoric, poetics, ethics, etc. Scholars in these fields are by and large disinclined to connect truth to some form of objective reality outside and beyond human intervention. Just consider Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist theory of language. Rather than carrying innate, unchanging meaning (signified), words (signifier), depending on how they are used and in which context, can mean different things to different speakers/listeners. To disentangle the ‘true’ meaning of words can thus be treacherous. Far from representing reality “as is,” the way humans use language, linguists tell us, has been crucial in shaping our respective notions of the real, including what we usually consider true or false.

7 From Plato to Poststructuralism, truth has been a conflicted issue. To distinguish between its various meanings as an, at once, epistemological, moral, and social construct has proven to be nearly impossible. Heidegger’s discussion of truth and Being in Being and Time , titled “Dasein, disclosedness, and truth” (ch. 44), is a case in point. For here, Heidegger connects truth to our being-in-the-world, thereby grounding it in the human condition rather than in a preexisting, self-evident material world. Truth, according to Heidegger, is inextricably linked to Dasein and language. From an ontological perspective, there is no truth that predates Dasein , our being-in-the-world, and of someone who says “I” and who exists in time and place. For Heidegger, truth cannot be explained by way of a theory of correspondences alone (as in Aristotle, Parmenides, and others). Any speech act, even if merely reflective of an irrefutable aspect of human existence, such as, say, mortality or gravity, engages the interlocutor in myriad different ways, not all of them factual or verifiable. By the same token, Heidegger foregrounds the intuitive and performative level of language; and since our being-in-the-world is predicated on the vagaries of language, that is, “disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity” ( BT 264), it is largely tied up with un-truth rather than with truth: “ Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of being is such that it is in ‘un-truth ’” ( BT 264).

• 2 For a detailed, philosophical assessment of Heidegger’s notion of truth in Being and Time, see, in (...)

8 Heidegger’s remarks on truth are complex, as they involve a number of linguistic and logical issues, such as negative assertive statements and the general problem of denotation. 2 Prior to Heidegger’s engagement, the latter has been famously discussed in Bertrand Russell’s 1905 essay “On Denoting.” Though primarily concerned with the mathematical and logical ramifications of denotation, Russell’s essay is important because it argues that we often have access to what we consider as being true solely by way of denotation and not through direct knowledge. “There seems no reason,” he writes, “to believe that we are ever acquainted with other people’s minds, seeing that these are not directly perceived; hence what we know about them is obtained through denoting” (480). While all thinking has to start with direct experience, “it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance” (480). Therefore, as Russell concludes, “such things as matter (in the sense in which matter occurs in physics) and the minds of other people are known to us only by denoting phrases, i.e. , we are not acquainted with them, but we know them as what has such and such properties” (492). If Russell’s remarks on denotation go against any theory of truth that posits a correspondence between an utterance and the object it is referring to, Heidegger’s ontological approach is even more radical. In the aforementioned chapter of Being and Time , “Dasein, disclosedness and truth,” he argues that to speak the truth can manifest itself in two, fundamentally opposite ways: for one, it can be an un-covering or dis-covering ( ent -decken) and, for another, a covering-up , a “ zu -decken” and “ ver -decken” of Being.

9 Significantly if also somewhat paradoxically, both are crucial for an understanding of the relation of truth and Dasein , and both are inextricably intertwined. Even though there is a right way to speak the truth about an object or a thing, namely, the un -covering or dis -covering of its Being, quite frequently the coeval potential for covering-up, which for Heidegger is closely associated with the human condition itself, takes the upper hand. An unavoidable consequence of language, the covering-up has to be fought continuously and relentlessly. To reign in the human propensity for ambiguity and un -truth, however, has nothing to do with coherence or correspondence, that is, with being right or wrong. As Heidegger repeatedly stresses, any statement about an abstract idea or an object is by necessity always true, either in relation to the person speaking or as the bringing forth, the foregrounding, of the mode of Being of the object spoken about. If a sign points towards something that is then designated, the relation between the sign and what is signified, as Heidegger insists, does in no way presuppose correspondence or verisimilitude.

10 What then distinguishes someone who speaks the truth from someone who utters a lie is the effort made by the former to curb the innate tendency of human speech to cover-up, camouflage and to dissimulate. The truth or, as Heidegger calls it, demonstration (“Bewährung”) of any speech activity correlates with its power to un -cover: “What is to be confirmed is that it discovers the being toward which it is. What is demonstrated is the discovering being of the assertion” ( BT 201). [“Zur Bewährung kommt, daß das aussagende Sein zum Ausgesagten ein Aufzeigen des Seienden ist, daß es das Seiende, zu dem es ist, entdeckt” ( SZ 218)]. Obviously, Heidegger’s critique of defining truth as merely a function of the correspondence between verbal statements and non-verbal facts resonates with postmodern, poststructuralist theories of language. Yet it also differs significantly from, say, the deconstructionist approach to language which presupposes an ongoing playing of signifiers and, therefore, an ongoing deferral of meaning. For, if from an ontological perspective, Being and truth are mutually dependable, so are Being and non-truth: if “Dasein is in the truth,” as Heidegger writes, then it is also true that “Dasein is in untruth” ( BT 204).

11 Moreover, since Dasein is rooted “equiprimordially in truth and untruth” ( BT 205) [“Das Dasein ist gleichursprünglich in der Wahrheit und Unwahrheit” ( SZ 223)], the truth of Being always has to be wrested from Being itself (“abgerungen”), it is almost a kind of theft (“Raub”). This latter idea of “wresting” truth from Being, which evokes a strenuous, painful struggle for truth, is of utmost significance in light of the current post-truth debate. Because it suggests a willful attempt at un-covering layers of ambiguity and un -truth, to “speak the truth,” for Heidegger, is to engage in a special kind of speech activity, driven by an intention to forcefully dis -cover the truth of Being. It should not go unnoticed, however, that Heidegger flat-out dismisses the idea of a subjective truth or any kind of solipsism regarding the truth of Being. Though closely bound-up with language and Being, truth as either un -covering (“entdeckend”) or as a covering-up (“Verdeckung”) exists independently of individual reasoning. If both of these modes of speaking represent different aspects of Being, the former, as Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes, should always be preferable to the latter. What is more, if a speech act that un -covers is in every respect more desirable than one that covers up, the former always necessitates an effort on the part of the speaker because she has to overcome the ambiguity arising from language itself. Speaking the truth, after all, is not about correspondences between words and objects or ideas; rather it turns on the ability of the speaker—and of what is spoken—to lay bare the truth of Being itself.

• 3 For a discussion of the differences and continuities between Heideggerian ontology and Foucauldian (...)
• 4 All quotations of “Truth and Discourse” are from the following online source, accessed on 22 July 2 (...)

12 Insofar as Heidegger’s ontological notion of truth as the “disclosedness” of Being stresses the performative aspects of a speech act that dis - or un -covers, it situates truth within the field of discourse. Important differences notwithstanding, Heidegger’s analysis here dovetails with Foucault’s interest in parrhesia (speaking the truth) which has been the focus of a series of six lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, titled “Discourse and Truth.” 3 As Foucault points out at the outset of these lectures, his objective is not to define truth as such, that is, how someone knows that a given statement is either true or false. What he looks at instead is speaking-the-truth as discourse, an auto-referential speech act the Greeks called parrhesia. Foucault actually uses the broader, less technical term “speech activity,” for parrhesia , as he takes pains to explain, does not simply mean “speaking the truth.” If translated literally, parrhesia means “to say everything,” not to withhold anything you have to say and to say it in the most direct and straightforward fashion. Parrhesia thus refers to a speaker and the way he speaks; and since he is not holding back anything he has in his mind, he opens himself up to an interlocutor by way of discourse (to retool Heidegger’s notion of disclosedness, you could say he dis -closes himself to the interlocutor). Yet in order to use parrhesia and become a parrhesiastes , a specific discursive context is required. Foucault lists three characteristics that are needed so that the idea of parrhesia applies. First, danger: “The parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk” 4 ; if a politician speaks the truth in spite of the risk of losing his or her popularity because what he or she has to say is against the public opinion then he or she uses parrhesia ; second, criticism: “The function of parrrhesia is not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker himself”; and third, duty: consider a speaker who has the option to either speak freely or not to speak at all (i.e. who does not speak under pressure or torture); if he or she then says something that is critical of someone else who is more powerful than the speaker him- or herself merely because he or she feels it to be his or her duty, then and only then, Foucault argues, the speaker can be called a parrhesisastes .

13 Both Heidegger’s definition of truth as a violent, strenuous un-covering of the hidden layers of Dasein and Foucault’s interest in parrhesia as a dangerous yet dutiful intervention of an individual into public discourse resonate in important ways with the current post-truth crisis. Both refrain from exploring the possibility of knowing the truth as such; rather, they ask about the conditions of speaking the truth, of its potential, in Heidegger’s case, to bring to light important yet hidden aspects of our being-in-the world and, in Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia , of why it matters that we speak truly even if against our own best interest. Speaking the truth thus appears to be much more—or, if you want, less—than merely an epistemological issue, it becomes a social imperative. Heidegger’s more opaque ontological approach, one could argue, may have served well to camouflage his own fatal implication in totalitarian politics during his term as Rektor of the University of Freiburg. Because it stresses un-truth as an indelible ingredient of truth itself, it could be easily misread as an all-out opportunistic, overly malleable concept. Like Foucault, however, he stresses the discursive aspects of speaking truthfully and, what is more, the fact that truth is not some kind of “ready-made” entity to be either chosen or overlooked. For both, Heidegger and Foucault, truth is part and parcel of the act of speaking out against all odds, and it is only then, under the arduous conditions of criticism, danger, and duty, that truth as discourse is forged from a world of un-truth and covering-up.

2. Know It Yourself

5 See Fish, Slavik, Anastas, and Nichols.

6 Cf. Slavik “Das kann ich doch auch.”

7 See Anastas, “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance.’”

14 As many have noted, anti-professional attitudes, coupled with a profound suspicion of institutions of higher learning, are on the rise. 5 According to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the US now believes that “colleges and universities… have a negative effect on the country” (quoted in Green, NYT ). In a recent article in The Federalist, political scientist Tom Nichols even depicts a large-scale sell-out of knowledge amounting to what he calls the “death of expertise.” The ramifications of this latest distrust in expertise are considerable, as it extends far beyond academic institutions to affect almost any form of professional training. The reasons for this development are manifold. If the easy availability of rudimentary professional knowhow via online sources has fueled a new “do-it-yourself”/“know-it-yourself” amateur culture, cultural and institutional factors also conjoined to spawn the dismantling of professional knowledge. 6 In the US, anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism have, for a long time, shaped a cultural-industrial complex determined to undermine professional expertise and the authority of institutionalized knowledge. 7

15 Yet, anti-professionalism has also grown from within the academy itself. Long before Trump lionized the widespread populist attacks on science and the university, the French historian of science, Bruno Latour, argued that the erosion of expertise has been fostered, at least in part, from within the humanities and the critical sciences themselves. Remarkably prescient of recent developments, Latour’s aforementioned 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam” takes issue with an already widening gap between the world of science and the world of Joe-the-plumber, that is, blue-collar America. “What has become of critique,” Latour asks, “when there is a whole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon?” (228). And what “if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique?” (229–30). If the former already speaks to an increasing onslaught of fake news and conspiracy theories, the latter raises considerable doubt regarding critical practices within the humanities that have actually ceased to be critical at all, and instead have championed knee-jerk responses (“power, society, discourse”) for almost every social and cultural issue there is.

16 Obviously, Latour could not have known that Stephen Bannon and other right-wing strategists would use poststructuralist jargon to powerfully “deconstruct” American government. As he noticed early on, however, for conservatives to raise doubt about the scientific evidence of global warming, a critique Latour’s own writing had been complicit in administering, offered an inroad to eventually dismiss scientific expertise altogether. Though for science studies, a field he had helped establish, “the question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism” (231). Yet it’s largely rationalist approach to the contrary, the critical study of science has paved the way for the most egregious and dangerous anti-enlightenment thinking. “The mistake we made,” Latour grudgingly admits, “the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible” (231).

• 8 See Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of P (...)

17 To remedy the loss of a shared experience of reality triggered by identity politics and accompanying relativist concepts such as “situated” knowledge (Haraway), 8 Latour calls for a return to a new “realist” attitude: if critical thinking, and, by implication, the humanities at large, should be able to renew itself and thus have a future, “it is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude…, but a realism dealing with what I call matters of concern, not matters of fact” (231). Though reality is by no means defined entirely by matters of fact, facts do matter in that they are often political renderings of matters of concern or, to a lesser extent, “states of affairs” (232). Latour clearly describes his own effort at debunking certain myths surrounding the history of science as closely wedded to Enlightenment thought. Yet while enlightenment thinkers originally used scientific facts to criticize older, premodern beliefs and illusions, over time these facts have been used to also cover up some of science’s own innate prejudices and vested interests. As of yet, it is by no means clear whether we can devise “another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care?” (232). In other words, can matters of concern be reframed so that they include more than just one fractured version of reality, and become a powerful driving force in today’s globalized yet hopelessly divided world?

9 Epilogue to “The Thing”; “A Letter to a Young Student, Freiburg i. Br. 18 June 1950” (184).

18 Whatever this new kind of realism might entail, it should not be of the same ilk as the so-called “new humanities,” proffered by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in a controversial 2013 piece for the New Republic , titled “Science is Not Your Enemy.” Pinker and his conservative fellow critics envision a field stripped of its idealist trappings and so redefined that it is decidedly more receptive to scientific methodology. To thus “scientize” the humanities, however, is not a solution but yet another attempt at cementing the waning influence and public reputation not merely of the soft sciences but of the university at large. “Being is in no way identical with reality or with a precisely determined actuality,” Heidegger writes in an epilogue to his essay “The Thing.” “In thinking of Being, it is never the case that only something actual is represented in our minds and then given out as that which alone is true” (181). It is this latter kind of self-critical inquiry into the conditions of Being that the humanities of old—and, frankly, all of enlightenment thinking—have been good at. Latour is right in arguing that the task of the humanities is to return to a new sense of realism, a realism of concern, or as Heidegger would put it, a realism that “examines as it listens” (184). To follow such a path, Heidegger knew all too well, takes both courage and practice in going. Yet practice also needs craft, and so to stay on the path, as Heidegger writes in a letter to a young student, we need to learn unswervingly “the craft of thinking, yet erring.” 9

3. Common Sense

• 10 See, among others, Alan Kirby’s 2009 analysis Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Pos (...)

19 It should have become sufficiently clear by now that the idea of a post-truth cultural environment makes little sense. What has changed significantly with the onslaught of “digimodernism,” Alan Kirby’s term for the now dominant form of neoliberal, digitized global capitalism, is by no means the disappearance of truth as we know it. 10 Rather, what has been “covered up,” to retool Heidegger’s wording in Being and Time , is our appreciation and understanding of the pivotal role of parrhesia , of speaking the truth even in the face of danger and of negative consequences for the speaking self. This, then, brings me to the issue of politics and of what could be possibly done about the alarming demise of common sense, a term I use here in its broadest and most democratic meaning, that is, as the shared experience of reality and of the values that we attach to this reality.

11 Cf. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man.

20 If anti-professionalism and the death of expertise have been conducive to further diminish the reputation of the humanities and, to a great extent, of the sciences in general, the conspicuous absence of any meaningful political alternative to late (digital) capitalism has further eroded our willingness to speak out in public, to become (again)—as Foucault has it— parrhesiastes . However urgent we now think this issue is, the crisis of public intervention in politics, as Richard Sennett has shown, has been coeval with the birth of modern society itself. 11 In fact, the erosion of the public arena as a performative space where political decision-making is both enacted and acted out dates back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the public domain has been increasingly emptied out of its earlier, social meaning. Sennett describes these transformative changes in the public domain as the substitution of the public by a private self. In other words, even though the enlightenment has incubated, by way of the printing press and the burgeoning new metropolitan spaces, a powerful culture of public discourse and public performance, by the end of the nineteenth century it had been almost completely layered over by an inward-looking culture of intimacy.

21 In 1977, the year his landmark study was originally published, Sennett could have hardly envisioned the new public spaces opened up by social media and the internet. Yet his principle argument, it seems to me, still rings true. The lenses through which most of us view the world are now almost entirely filtered by private, intimate concerns. By the same token, we consider the taking on of a public office, our membership in a church, a trade union, or a political party, and even voting itself, as—at best—a formal obligation and—at worst—a dispensable nuisance. “In a society where intimate feeling is an all-purpose standard of society,” Sennett explains, “experience is organized in two forms which lead to… unintended destructiveness. In such a society the basic human energies of narcissism are so mobilized that they enter systematically and perversely into human relationships. In such a society, the test of whether people are being authentic and ‘straight’ with each other is a peculiar standard of market exchange in intimate relations” (8).

22 Sennett wrote The Fall of Public Man against the backdrop of the countercultural revolution of the 1970s, which heavily emphasized individual authenticity and personal expression. And yet, it would be difficult to think of a more appropriate description of the social-cultural environment that enabled the Trump presidency and that many now call the post-truth era. If politics today ostensibly encroach every nook and cranny of individual self-expression (just think of academic ‘safe’ spaces and the ongoing policing of the self by way of social and commercial pressure), both political reasoning and the willingness to speak out and criticize the powers that be, have become conspicuously dysfunctional. Multiple forces have driven this development, yet it is equally obvious that for too long societies in the West have stressed individual experience at the expense of public responsibility. When Thomas Paine, at the beginning of Common Sense (1776), calls government the “badge of lost innocence” because it is an intrinsically evil force yet necessary to “restrain our vices” (69), he not only recognizes the volatility of the human psyche. What he also acknowledges is the need for a social contract and the division of power as cornerstones of any modern society. All modern nations have delegated, though to varying degrees, executive power to the government, juridical power to the courts, and the power to inform and enlighten about the state of affairs to the press. Simultaneously, they have either actively created or at least tolerated public spaces that provide room for individual expression and participation in decision-making processes.

23 That in a democracy a small number of politicians yield executive power over their fellow citizens is a calamity; yet one, as Paine argues, that is acceptable because it ultimately guarantees freedom and security. The consenting of the majority of citizens to “leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would act were they present” ( CS 7–8) is based, for one, on the condition that this body of representatives is being elected into office; and for another, it rests on the assumption that there will be a common interest among every part of the community. To ensure that the elected “might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often” ( CS 8). The rationale here is to avoid division by interest and status, and instead to strengthen the interconnectedness—what Paine calls “mingling”—of both parties, so that they mutually support each other.

24 At the outset of modern society there has thus been a shared understanding of the wisdom of certain rules and norms that were in place for the common good. There has also been widespread agreement that the “truth” of democracy and of modern government can never be stated in abstract, objectified terms. If absolute truth obtained as an important social goal, it was unavoidably inflected “by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world” ( CS 8). Yet like many enlightenment thinkers, Paine was convinced that “however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and of reason will say, it [i.e. to be governed in that way] is right” ( CS 8). It is by virtue of reason or common sense alone that we subscribe to the social contract that undergirds all modern political institutions. What this also means, however, is that one should avoid any form of dishonesty while holding public office, regardless of whether it is directed towards oneself or towards the electors. Once a man has so far “corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe,” Paine later wrote in The Age of Reason , “he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime” ( AR 8). What is more, it would be impossible to calculate “the moral mischief… that mental lying has produced in society” ( AR 8). This notion of an almost moral obligation to be true to oneself also informs Foucault’s parrhesiastes . Far from ushering in a world of multiple and therefore of no truth at all, to avoid “mental lying,” in both Paine and Foucault, enables political praxis because it allows the speaker to act responsibly in the public arena.

25 There is plenty of room to speculate why the ideals of mental honesty and of parrhesia have become totally corrupted. Or, why many have lost confidence in the institutions initially set up to support and guarantee individual freedom. “I do not believe,” Paine states in The Age of Reason (1794) , “in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church ” ( AR 8, my emphasis). The ambivalence of this kind of idealization of personal authenticity is obvious. Moreover, it reflects much larger contradictions well embedded within Enlightenment thinking itself. As Peter Gay points out, “the state within, and the state system as a whole appeared to have aims incompatible with enlightened ideals” (450). If Enlightenment ideas appealed to a large extent to individual reasoning independent from and often at odds with institutionalized knowledge and tradition, political formations, on the other hand, demand the persistence of habit, the burden of deference, and the accountability of rules. Put differently, intellectual self-reliance and the exigencies of the state are often—if not mutually exclusive—at least difficult to integrate.

26 This also means that the tendency towards ever greater civil division, as well as a growing tension between the state and its constituents, is firmly nested within the intellectual foundations of modern democratic society itself. “As for morality,” Paine proudly stated in The Age of Reason, “the knowledge of it exists in every man’s conscience” ( AR 183). The enlightenment’s dependence on science and factual evidence to the contrary, the same could be said of the notion of truth. It is in this context that the companion idea of “common sense” truly matters. As guarantor of collectively shared values, duties, and morals, common sense—in its broadest and most inclusive understanding—could guide us through the maze of subjective experiences and the political fallout of the modern culture of intimacy (including its latest version as post-truth). That we collectively agree on the kind of reality we privilege and cherish, it seems to me, is now more imperative than ever. For the demise of common sense does not bode well—for the university, for society, and for the future of mankind as we know it.

Bibliography

Anastas, Benjamin. “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance.’” The New York Times , 2 Dec. 2011.

Cappelletto, Chiara. Alternative Facts, Fiction, as if. Unpublished working paper, LMU Graduate School of Language and Literature, Munich, November 2017, pp. 1–5.

Carey, Benedict. “‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests.” The New York Times , 2 Jan. 2018.

Fish, Stanley. “Anti-Professionalism.” New Literary History , no. 17, pp. 89–108.

Foucault, Michel. Discourse and Truth & Parresia . Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, translated by Nancy Luxon, U of Chicago P, 2019.

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom . Norton, 1969.

Green, Joshua. “No One Cares About Russia in the World Breitbart Made.” The New York Times , 15 July 2017.

Harraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature , edited by D. Haraway, Routledge, 1991, pp. 183–202.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetry Language Thought , translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper, 1971, pp. 163–184.

---. Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 1962.

James, William. “Lecture IV: Pragmatism’s Concept of Truth.” Pragmatism , edited by W. James, Harvard UP, 1975, pp. 95-113.

Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture . The Continuum International Publishing Company, 2009.

Lane, Neal F., and Michael Riordan. “Trump’s Disdain for Science.” The New York Times , 4 Jan. 2018.

Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry , Winter 2004, pp. 225-248.

Nichols, Tom. “The Death of Expertise.” The Federalist , 17 Jan. 2014.

Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg, editors. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters . U of Minnesota P, 2003.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense . Prometheus Books, 1995.

---. The Age of Reason . Prometheus Books, 1984.

Pinker, Steven. “Science Is Not Your Enemy.” The New Republic , 7 Aug. 2013.

---. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress . Viking, 2018.

Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind , vol. 14, no. 56, Oct. 1905, pp 479-493.

Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man . Knopf, 1977.

Slavik, Angelika. “Das kann ich doch auch.” Süddeutsche Zeitung , no. 26, 30/31 Dec. 2017.

Willer, Malte. “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit . Versuch einer Neubeleuchtung.” Philosophisches Jahrbuch , vol. 113, no. 1, 2006, pp. 78–98.

1 Cf. Lane and Riordan, “Trump’s Disdain for Science;” Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”

2 For a detailed, philosophical assessment of Heidegger’s notion of truth in Being and Time, see, in German, Willer, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit. Versuch einer Neubeleuchtung.”

3 For a discussion of the differences and continuities between Heideggerian ontology and Foucauldian genealogy and discourse analysis respectively, see the essays in: Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, editors, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters .

4 All quotations of “Truth and Discourse” are from the following online source, accessed on 22 July 2019: www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Foucault,Michel/Foucault%20-%20Discourse

%20and%20truth.pdf.

8 See Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.”

10 See, among others, Alan Kirby’s 2009 analysis Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture.

Electronic reference

Klaus Benesch , “Is Truth to Post-Truth what Modernism Is to Postmodernism? Heidegger, the Humanities, and the Demise of Common-Sense” ,  European journal of American studies [Online], 15-1 | 2020, Online since 11 May 2020 , connection on 27 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/15619; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.15619

About the author

Klaus benesch.

Klaus Benesch is Professor of English and American Studies at LMU University of Munich. From 2006 through 2013, he was Director of the Bavarian American Academy (Munich). He served as member of the Editorial Board of the  Encyclopedia of American Studies Online  (published by Johns Hopkins University Press) and is general editor (with Miles Orvell, Jeffrey Meikle, and David Nye) of “Architecture/Technology/Culture,” a monograph series published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Major publications include:  Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity . (editor; Palgrave, 2016);  Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue  (editor; U of Pennsylvania P, 2014);  Culture and  Mobility (editor; Winter, 2013);  Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance  (2. ed., paperback; U of Massachusetts P, 2009);  Scientific Cultures–Technological Challenges: A Transatlantic Perspective  (editor; Winter, 2009);  The Power and Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture  (editor; Winter, 2007); and  Space in America: Theory, History, Culture  (edi­tor; Rodopi, 2005).

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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The American Abyss

A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.

The police forced the crowd out of the Capitol building after facing off in the Rotunda, Jan. 6, 3:40 p.m. Credit... Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

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By Timothy Snyder

• Published Jan. 9, 2021 Updated Dec. 28, 2021

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When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell , indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.

My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems . But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.”

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.”

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up.

Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.

If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol.

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom. Ashley Gilbertson is an Australian photojournalist with the VII Photo Agency living in New York. Gilbertson has covered migration and conflict internationally for over 20 years.

A picture caption with an earlier version of this essay misidentified as a rioter a shirtless man shown outside a broken door at the Capitol. He was a videographer who removed his shirt after being pepper-sprayed while covering the event for The Daily Caller, not one of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol. The original caption stated that he had punched the door; in fact, he said he was attempting to retrieve his phone, with which he had been documenting the event.

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Our Coverage of the Capitol Riot and its Fallout

T he Events on Jan. 6

Timeline:  On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump raided the U.S. Capitol . Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded .

A Day of Rage:  Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a New York Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why .

Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died  in connection with the attack.

Jan. 6 Attendees:  To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, Jan. 6 wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start .

The Federal Case Against Trump

The Indictment:  Trump was indicted on Aug. 1  after a sprawling federal investigation into his attempts to cling to power  after losing the 2020 election. Here is how the indictment was structured .

Trump’s Immunity Claim:  The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared ready to rule that former presidents have some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution , a move that could further delay the case against Trump.

The Trial:  In February, the federal judge in the case decided to delay the trial , which was set to start on March 4. In doing so, she acknowledged that time had run out to get the proceeding going, mostly because of the wrangling over Trump’s immunity claim .

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