Michiko Kakutani - The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
From post-modernism to
filter bubbles, ‘truth decay’ has been spreading for decades. How can we stop
alternative facts from bringing down democracy?.. the more clownish aspects of Trump the
personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his
assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in
our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate
who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and
deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were
portions of the public not blase about truth-telling and were there not
systemic problems with how people get their information and how they’ve come to
think in increasingly partisan terms.
Two of the most
monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both
were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that
cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and
false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote
in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject
of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but
people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of
experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of
thought) no longer exist.”
Arendt’s words
increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling
descrip-tion of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today – a world
in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by
Russian troll
factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of
the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through
social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation,
fear of social change and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as
people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense
of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian
lines. This is not to draw a
direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the over-whelming horrors of
the second world war era, but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes –
what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” in George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – that make a
people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy
prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the
displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing
the value of truth, and what that means for the world.
The term “truth decay”
has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as
“fake news” and “alternative facts”. And it’s not just fake news either: it’s
also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers, who
oppose vaccination), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white
supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake
followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots)… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/14/the-death-of-truth-how-we-gave-up-on-facts-and-ended-up-with-trumpsee also
Andrew
Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the
liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
