The Myth of the "Post-Truth Era"

We've Always Lived with This; It's Just Some People are Finally Recognizing It.

During Thanksgiving week and the days since then, I’ve been hearing a lot of people refer to our current era as a “Post-Truth” or “Post- Rational” world. It stems from the idea that despite the factual evidence, despite being confronted with evidence that conclusively disproves people’s positions on particular issues or ideas, it is still discarded, ignored, and counter-rationalized to result in a position opposed to the evidence. Back in 2016, “Post Truth” was even Oxford Dictionary’s “Word of the Year.”

In general, I get it. The number of people who seem oblivious to news, what is happening in the world, logical fact and what their own two eyes show them seems overwhelming. Jordan Klepper, the comedian reporter from the Daily Show has made a career out of going to MAGA rallies and contradicting their stupidity:

And this is demonstrative of many people. They believe something so adamantly, that you can hold up unequivocal proof of how wrong it is, and they will stubbornly adhere to their belief and use any means possible to discredit the actual facts. There are some standard rebuttals they will give:

1. A common one is to discredit the messenger. They’ll comment about the bias of the messenger, that the person pushing it has an agenda and that where they obtained that information is tainted by biased channels. “Fake News” and “Liberal Media” are common refrains for this course of rejection of the evidence.

2. Probably the next most common is to marginalize the facts as an exception, not the rule. “Well in that case…” is a familiar way they start sentences rebutting that. Another is “You don’t know the context there; when you look at the bigger picture it makes a lot more sense.”

3. One that has picked up in popularity is to smear either the facts themselves or messenger with a scurrilous label. During the ‘90s it was just common to point a finger and call such an inconvenient fact as “liberal.” Since then, they’ve migrated to calling such a thing outright “communist,” demonstrating somehow that the same facts can become even further extreme just by being true.

4. But easily the most common one is simply “I don’t care. I believe what I believe and that does not conform to my beliefs therefore I will disregard that.”

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to cover the easily disprovable facts and material actually promoted and making the rounds out of rank opportunism, virtue signaling and ideological promotion and propaganda. The recent Israel-Hamas War has demonstrated this to the extreme and harshly, regardless of which side you sympathize with. But for a more recent and less emotional take, here’s FOX News over the Thanksgiving holiday concocting a border security/terrorism crisis out of thin air, courtesy of Charlie Sykes.

And the usual right wing trolls, what did they have to say about the event?

Now, we tend to believe this is only a one sided problem; that only the right is completely oblivious to facts. In the sheer number of volume, degree and what I suppose could be called “Right Wing Standard Operating Procedure” I would generally agree. It’s so prevalent it’s a feature of the conservative right in this country, and the last several generations have been brought up and programmed to think that way from birth. But the left is far from immune to these issues. You can take the same four items listed above and very easily apply them to more than one issue or occassion when the left did (and continues to do) the same thing. Just go on Twitter or Threads and criticize one of the lefts sacred totems and watch the negative comments roll in. It’s part and parcel of an absolutist thought, that to concede anything makes you weaker, that to acknowledge such an inconvenient fact only puts your beliefs further at risk. The end justifies the means, and in this case the end is to win politically, at all costs, including at the expense of the obective truth. To that extent, the “I don’t care” response is the only one that matters when confronted with belief conflicting evidence. That’s why no level of actual information you give these people will ever work; they just don’t care, and won’t until the consequences smack them personally right upside the head.

All in all, it’s not just “Post-Truth” as it is the current disconnect between actuality and perception. The actual results seem to be irrational compared to what we think people should feel. JV Last succinctly put it this way:

However, the recent media attention would have you believe this is modern phenomena. Hardly. Intentional obtuseness has always been a defense mechanism to an insurgent belief. Throughout history, the most common way to deflect was to use religion; who hasn’t heard “It’s just God’s way” to put an end to an argument? It was an effective one too; to further argue meant you weren’t just refuting a person, but an omnipotent being; the arrogance! It’s so old the church used it against Galileo in the 1500s. The intent isn’t to refute the facts, it’s to silence and ostracize dissent socially. If you think back to growing up in Middle and High School, you’ll recognize how prevalent it was even back then; to contest the cool clique or the popular team leader often resulted in social gulag. It’s the reason pledges being hazed during rush week for fraternities and sororities tolerate lies from those higher up the totem pole than them. People are social creatures and the need to belong far exceeds the need to be right.

So what’s changed? Well, a couple things:

1. The Internet has given the least informed, most obtuse uncompromising individuals a platform. Their absolute conviction draws an audience over more reasoned, nuanced, rational individuals and their profiles get promoted and followed. Before, there were filters based on location, time, distance, expertise and people controlling the channels of communication. There’s none of that now.

2. People identify more today in regard to a political tribe rather than a regional/local one. What the person next door believes isn’t as important than what RudeAwakening10865 does on Social Media. We get more of an endorphin rush when our “like” count increases by one than we do when our neighbor wishes us a good day. One of the reasons people stayed with Twitter longer than they liked, despite the hate, was because of the number of “followers” they had (even though many may have been fake or in fact left months or years ago). That’s f**ked up.

3. Donald Trump came around, that’s what. And “the truth” that many believed about the conservative right was turned on its head. Many on the right always gave lip service to the truth but went along with the Fox News, conservative circle dynamic for a long time, because they were politically advantaged to do so. They thought the social constructs they’d designed and codes they’d lived by for decades would hold against the Donald. They were wrong. Donald Trump used all of the possible rebuttals against his campaign to turn people into true believers and make villains of anyone who disputed him. He socially swept to the side in a party anyone more concerned with facts than with winning; those “Never Trumpers” left and have been the biggest proponents of the “Post-Truth” theory of the moment. Liberals, of course, have every reason to continue to promote this as well, since it fits their narrative of the moment, particularly that the facts are on their side (they are mostly) and that people who don’t agree are imbeciles (that part isn’t enitrely true though). They have a big microphone about it too.

So the question is, when will it end? It WON’T. That’s what a lot of people don’t seem to get. It will evolve. People will become more cynical about the extreme absolute beliefs that warp people’s moral cores and learn to live with them in apathy. The prevalent ideologies of it will shift too; from the aging Conservative Baby Boomers who will eventually die out to the emerging Social Justice Liberal Gen Z true believers who will dominate politics for the next several generations. In the very near future it will morph, and change and the facts (and how they are presented) will continue to modernize still but it won’t end. AI will demonstrate new versions of “the truth.” How we will discern the vast quantities of information, truth or not, and discriminate between what is perceived as fact and what is perceived as fiction will continue to change. But the main point I want to get across here is not that there is a “Post Truth Era” but that it is and continues to be a product of human social interaction, of the way people have always been and will continue to be.

PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories

Here is a great podcast from The Bulwark with Charlie Sykes and Will Saletan talking through some of these issues.

Here is another podcast from The Bulwark with AB Stoddard and JV Last referring to it as a “Post Rational World.”

Post Truth even has a Wikipedia Page.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

I want to dive a little bit further into who the idea of a “Post Truth Era” seems to be prevalent now as opposed to say 20 or even 200 years ago.

People are commonly familiar with the idea of a cause and effect dynamic. An event happens (the cause) resulting in something consequential (the effect). It’s basic logic. In antiquity, such events could often be attributed to the Gods. It wasn’t lightning caused by static electricity, it was Zeus punishing the wicked because he was upset. It wasn’t the Greeks who won because of the Trojan Horse, it was the Gods upset at the hubris of Troy. Gods’ will has a very convenient way of descibing why anything outside of human intelligence occured resulting in some consquence. And of course, what most clerics and priests would call “The Truth” had nothing to do with fact or evidence, only what they believed.

With the advent and emergence of science to help explain these things, the actual facts became better described and clearer but not necessarily accepted. The church condemned Galileo despite proof he was right. It dissented on Darwin for a long time too, despite the clear evidence of his logic. Sometimes it was not religion providing the argument but other scientists. Louis Pasteur’s suggestion of boiling liquids to kill bacteria was refuted on the basis that he had killed the “living ether” of the water and had nothing to do with bacteria; it wasn’t until he disproved that that they came around. A book was published by 121 scientists refuting Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.¹ The scientist who coined the term “Big Bang” did so out of ridicule and mockery of the person who first theorized it. Over time, with study and repeated experimentation, the truth eventually bore out.

Which underscores a few major reasons why truth is not always readily accepted. First, it usually upsets the established status quo, and the status quo are the most likely to resist it, since it implies they are wrong. It’s a purely human reaction to snap back. People have been told something has been a fact so long that they don’t like the changes that come with an entirely new way of looking at things. The bigger the change, the more likely they will resist it. Second, more complex answers are harder for the general public to wrap their head around. Until it can be presented to them in a way that can demonstrate the matters at hand and explained in a digestible way, there will always be a level of doubt. It’s what makes the “God answer” so deceptively acceptable; it’s simple and requires no additional evidence, you just point and say “God did it.”

However, the biggest reason to me why the idea of “Post-truth” is so prevalent today is because it started in academia and socially upper classes. To them, the facts are not in dispute and using the general logic, if you do A then this consequence B should result. We’re dealing much of this here not with hard facts but rather “social truths” which are much more subjective. But what happens when there are no consquences? This is the primary factor in promoting the “post Truth” theory of current social trends. By most accounts of what values Americans want to uphold, Hillary should have won in 2016, but she didn’t. Trump should’ve been entirely unpopular, but wasn’t. He’s committed crimes and insurrection, but hasn’t been convicted. His supporters push lies and falsehoods relentlessly, but still get support and coverage. The Republican Party should lose across the board, but electorally holds it’s own.

People look at this and say “People must just not believe in truth,” without considering the potentially false aspects of their original logic. They consider the institutions working against them and note their corruption, but they also fail to note why the opposition’s line of thought is persuasive and effectively emulate it. One of the important aspects of any science is re-assessing your process and theory when you get an abnormal result. Many people still refuse to do so. It’s just easier to say the other people are wrong; to say “truth no longer exists.”

Contrast that with those on the lower end of the economic and educational ladder who are usually steamrolled over, neglected or outright ignored. When they spoke up about injustices and their perspectives, academia and economic elite typically scoffed, saying at a macro level everything was working as anticipated and that they’ll be fine. In fact, you’re starting to see much of this now, as evidence of the disconnect between how the economy is working at a wider level as opposed to the local ones, where Main Streets are still dying and smaller towns becoming more abandoned by the youth seeking opportunity elsewhere.

How do the academics refer to this grassroots position in order to dismiss it? Populism. That’s what must explain it. Falling under the spell of a demagogue who had the audacity to tell them what they wanted to hear.

But to those small town people, they may not even think Trump is the answer; the fact he wants to smack the academic and economic elite that look down on them upside the head may provide a pretty appealing thought to all of them though. And when you work backward from there, is there any doubt about why they believe what they do?

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

Einstein himself ridiculed the very idea of Quantum Mechanics. Unlike other areas of science that rely on a more if/then result, Quantum Mechanics relies more on probability.² Einstein rejected this notion, saying, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” to which Niels Bohr responded, “Albert, quit telling God what to do!”

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Einstein’s rebuttal to this was “Why did they need 100, if they were right only 1 would do.”

2. A common example of this is the story of Schrodinger’s Cat, which demonstates under a certain scenario that a cat is both 50% living and 50% dead at the same time in the context of Quantum Theory. Einstein thought the concept as rubbish at the time, but it has proven correct over time and he eventually accepted it.