Are We in Peak Post-Truth?

What is truth?

The phrase recurrently surfaced during debates about the accessibility of truth at moments of conflict throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Now, ‘post-truth’ has its own Oxford English Dictionary entry: “Relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” ‘Post-truth,’ then, is apparently about privileging feelings over facts.

‘Post-truth’ really came into its own, however, during President Trump’s first term, when he was repeatedly accused of waging a “war on truth” by the mainstream media, to which he responded by calling them “fake news.” In watching the president and the media accuse each other of abandoning truth, commentators surmised that we had finally entered the ‘post-truth’ era. Where the supposed truth was to be found, it eventually transpired, largely depended on your instincts, intuitions, and prejudices, because between Trump’s ‘war on truth’ and the web of ‘fake news’ outlets, we peasants all found ourselves in a hall of mirrors. 

Making sense of this bizarre paradigm assumes that we have some kind of working answer to the question of “What is truth?”—a question made famous by Pontius Pilate. Notoriously, Pilate left the room before Jesus Christ had the opportunity to reply, probably because he knew he could not cope with the answer. 

But Pilate was only rhetorically raising the question that has haunted our civilisation since Plato—a few centuries prior—suggested that the ordinary human condition is akin to that of being prisoners chained to a wall, looking upon shadows of creatures that themselves are not even real, but mere cut-outs and puppets. Basically, our alienation from the truth is, Plato intimated, both normative and multi-layered. And even if we encountered the truth by some miraculous escape from the cave, Plato asserted we’d be blinded by the light of it in any case. 

Nonetheless, ‘What is truth?’ is a question that presupposes we know what truth is, or can at least differentiate whatever it denotes from an error or lie. Were this not the case, the question itself would be unintelligible to us. And despite the Oxford Dictionary definition above, whatever truth is, we know that it is irreducible to ‘facts.’ 

Beyond facts

When Jesus Christ claimed to be the Truth, He was not saying that He was a jumble of facts, but rather claiming to embody ultimate reality. It is important to grasp this point: insofar as we consider truth from the perspective of what’s quantifiable and measurable, we will think of truth in terms of ‘facts’; insofar as we think of truth from the perspective of what’s qualitative and predicable, we will think of truth as a transcendental attribute. 

The reduction of truth to facts has a fascinating ideational genealogy, covering which is beyond the scope of this little essay. Nonetheless, it is paramount to acknowledge this historical reduction of the concept of truth, because it largely renders explicable why transcendental claims about truth—like those of Christ to be the Truth—seem opaque to us. It also explains why more mundane claims—like saying that one thing is more beautiful than another—are equally opaque to us; after all, what are the ‘facts’ of aesthetics or manners, for example? In such cases, ‘truth’ is simply not synonymous with ‘fact.’ 

For this reason, the intuitive but utterly sound assertion that truth is a quality is often treated today as an expression of mere vacuous emotion. YouTube is littered with videos of blue-haired, woke activists screaming and shouting at smug conservatives in blazers, with captions like “Woke snowflake is DESTROYED with REASON and LOGIC.” There, what you are actually witnessing is the frustration of someone who has an intuitive grasp of the truth but none of the humane education to convey it, confronting someone who has mentally reduced all truth to the mere factual. Such videos are presentations of two forms of modernist stupidity colliding. In short, such videos mark the death of wisdom. 

The ancients understood that truth was applicable both to the quantitative and the qualitative, but also understood that the latter surpassed the former. Nonetheless, there remained a perennial correlativity between these two notions of truth. So if, say, a regime consistently got the supposedly factual wrong, this would undermine that regime’s claim to have the quality of truth. 

This is indeed what happened to Soviet regimes in the 20th century. Even those comrades who were fully committed to the regime found it difficult to sustain their belief in it when they were told every day that they were well fed while they grew hungrier. If a regime tells you that you are well fed, also compelling you to say that you are well fed, and all the while you and your compatriots starve, the mounting quantitative untruths corrode belief in the qualitative truth of the regime.

The untruth regime

Well, what I’ve just described is exactly what is happening in the West today. We are consistently told that we must believe lies, and we must celebrate what we know to be both untrue and harmful, and if we do not do so, we will be punished. Consequently, there is a collapse of belief in the qualitative truth of those regimes under which we live.

The watershed moment was COVID. There had been many reasons to lose faith in our regimes in the preceding decades, but COVID brought everything to a head. It wasn’t so much the virus as the proposed remedies. How we were going to beat the virus just didn’t make any sense. Gathering was going to be lethal, and thus the right of assembly was suspended, unless you supported BLM, and then it was not lethal to assemble. Drinking in a pub was lethal, unless you ordered a meal, and then it somehow became not lethal to drink in a pub. Children could continue to go to school if there was no way for their parents to educate them at home, but Granny still had to die alone no matter what.

Why? Because the government said so, and they were following the science—in other words, facts. The trouble was, as these ‘facts’ turned out to be untruths, clearly promulgated by governments that knew them to be untruths, trust in the governments’ regimes waned, and did so with astonishing speed.

Those governments probably could have clawed back the trust of the citizenry if it were not for the jabs. We were told that the jabs would prevent infection and transmission. It became clear that the jabs would do neither. Then we were told that the jabs would mitigate infection and transmission. It then became apparent that they wouldn’t do that either. The primary reason provided for the social and professional coercion to take these under-tested, experimental toxins was to protect others. Then we discovered that they hadn’t even been tested for whether they prevented or mitigated transmission.

As time passed, we discovered that the “safe and effective” jabs were both ineffective and killing or injuring vast numbers of people. The most injurious jabs (like AstraZeneca) were quietly withdrawn, but the other jabs—all demonstrably dangerous—are still being administered to the most pitiably believing victims of the 2020-21 governmental terror campaign. 

Everything was a lie, those who oversaw the social and political operation knew it was a lie, and people had their lives ruined or they died because of the lie. To this day, the regime either pretends none of it ever happened or, when pressed, tells us we must still believe the lies. 

The number of lies grew, until it seemed our whole social settlement was based on a structure of lies. And we were informed via countless cases that if we did not believe the lies, we would be punished. We watched women’s sports collapse and women’s prisons infiltrated by predatory men impersonating women, while repeatedly being told that trans women are women. We watched entire towns and cities implode under the tyranny of Muslim rape-and-torture gangs, while we were told that diversity is our strength. Dissenters were hounded by a rogue police force and lives ruined by activist courts, while we were told that kindness is everything.

The effect of all the lies, of course, is that now everything is up for discussion. No one has the monopoly on truth anymore. The credibility of the old powers has gone, and now everything is on the table. 

If Candace Owens says Brigitte Macron is a man, she may or may not be correct, but whatever the case, it’s up for discussion. Owens’ campaign has already revealed that Brigitte is at least a child molester with connections to a bunch of nonces whom she and her husband deem close friends. If people say that Charlie Kirk was not really killed by a weirdo with a hunting rifle, they may or may not be correct, but it’s all up for discussion. Given that the shot sure looks like a pistol shot and there are too many oddities orbiting his death, why should we believe the official narrative? After all, it is precisely official narratives that have been demonstrated to be lies over and over again. And that’s the point: nothing can be prima facie believed now.

The choice before us

Let me be clear: I do not celebrate the collapse of qualitative truth due to the proliferation of quantitative untruths. Here in the United Kingdom, the collapse of the old truth institutions is extremely painful, and it remains unclear what will come in their stead. Until recently, the UK had five great truth institutions: the monarchy, the judiciary, the BBC, the NHS, and the Church of England. Together, those five institutions made up the adhesive that held together the nation’s affections. All five are now disgraced. 

The monarchy is beset by scandals. The once internationally respected common law judiciary of England is now a progressivist enforcer that punishes wrong opinion, is lenient on the nation’s enemies and hostile to its patriots. (And of course, David Lammy, an enemy of the nation if ever there was one, is now doing all he can to further corrupt the judiciary by attacking the millennium-old practice of trial by jury.) One can only speak with irony of the BBC’s renowned ‘impartiality.’ The NHS is in desperate need of reform and its trustworthiness has never recovered from its regime-collusion during COVID. It is not even worth talking about the CofE as a spiritual and moral guide of the nation, the idea of which is now ridiculous even to the pious. 

The collapse of qualitative truth in the moral, social, and political arenas is disastrous. What it entails is that decision-making will henceforth rest not on what’s good as arrived at by discursive discernment—namely the good as truth—but rather on who possesses arbitrary power. 

Joseph de Maistre observed at the end of the 18th century that the collapse of truth as embodied in institutions of authority naturally leads to an epoch of tyranny. Now it is only for us to imagine what such an epoch would look like when characterised by information-, communication-, and surveillance technologies. Or perhaps we don’t have to imagine. 

In such moments of civilisational rupture, one of two things tends to happen. Either the civilisation eventually implodes altogether, or a Carlylean ‘great man of history’ emerges from some hidden nook and rises as an avatar of the nation. Such a man typically manages to obtain the citizenry’s affections, and if he makes good on his claims, he gains the nation’s trust as well—that is what Hegel saw in Napoleon. Right now, it remains unclear what will unfold in the coming age, but one thing is certain: we cannot take the lies anymore.