It is no longer in the natural order of things to tell the truth in public affairs. PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking website in America, found that President Trump told the truth in only 16% of the statements he made in his campaign to be elected.
The campaign for Britain to exit the European Union was won in good part by shouting day after day the outright lie that membership of the EU was costing Britain £350 million per week.
The Oxford English Dictionary summed up the state of affairs by naming ‘post-truth’ as its word for 2016 – defining the term as follows: “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
So truth, facts, stories based on carefully checked and accurate reporting have been relegated to also-ran in the contest for the minds of people. How has this come about so decisively in recent times? A number of reasons come to mind.
If anything, people avoid rather than seek truth. We tend to believe information which confirms our pre-existing biases. We cherry-pick to reinforce our assumptions.
Secondly, the digital age has immensely reinforced this tendency. The flourishing of online news outlets and the very loud echo chambers we have created in the rampaging social media allow us to avoid contrary opinions and inconvenient facts – we simply select the ‘truth’ we like the best.
A third point is summed up in the statement much used in the Brexit campaign in Britain: “people have had enough of experts”. Slowly but surely trust in the people and institutions supposed to safeguard and pronounce on the truth of things has been eroded, thus allowing doubts, fake news, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories to take root. Experts declared the war in Iraq justified. Experts were sure that unmitigated free trade would benefit everyone. Experts never saw the disastrous financial meltdown of 2008 coming. Even at a technical level experts are failing to pass the accuracy test – a recent study in the British Medical Journal revealed that more than one third of press releases from top UK universities contained exaggerations. Contradictory ‘scientific’ studies have shown that wine, tea, coffee, milk, tomatoes, butter ‒ among other foods – cause or prevent cancer. Gradually suspicion of authoritative sources has grown into outright disbelief and even scorn. Who can doubt, for instance, that Donald Trump rode this horse into the White House?
The media itself all too often makes things worse by too easily following utterly fake leads, telling half the story for greater effect, relaying questionable rumours and even hoaxes without any attempt at checking, sometimes actually joining in the most dubious stories which happen to be going viral. Winning the battle to get attention very easily takes precedence over waging the war to keep people fully, accurately, objectively – truthfully – informed.
This loss of good faith in truth-producing institutions is a disaster. Democracy itself is put at risk. Without verified facts, without adherence to truth, there can be no real democratic debate and demagogues will win their way.
In 1951 the German-born Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote the following to warn the world: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Those whose job it is to sift fact from fiction, tell truth amidst proliferating deliberate falsehood, are surely finding that job much harder than ever, but they will also know that now it is a job that is more important than ever if freedom and democracy are going to survive.
