We live in fear of AI taking our jobs, replacing us in relationships, or even developing horrible robots that could devour the world. But long before any of that happens, we must face a different threat: technology’s ability to manipulate our emotions.
You too have seen fake photographs and videos retouched with advanced digital tools, or listened to speeches by famous politicians with voices and mannerisms indistinguishable from reality, all generated by AI. We live surrounded by tremendous lies and manipulation. The tactics of technological guerrilla warfare are designed not so much as to make you believe their lies, but rather to tint everything else with a shadow of suspicion, so as to make the truth indistinguishable from the lies. This is how we bury our freedom.
In the context of the Gaza conflict, we have seen scores of contradictory reports, each of them appealing to our most primitive emotions, to the point that the truth has become a minor consideration compared to the indignation, compassion, or hatred that the images arouse in us. Astonished, we witness reports from prestigious Western news outlets, ones with solid style guides and best practices, taking information from the terrorist group Hamas at face value. This is just the symptom of a much larger and more dangerous issue.
Not so long ago, the word post-truth became fashionable. Post-truth was the umpteenth attempt by agents of cultural relativism to make us believe that there is such a thing as individual ‘truth’ shaped by one’s feelings. Since at least St. Thomas Aquinas, we have known very well that “knowledge is according as the thing known is in the knower,” but the reality we approach is always the same. Truth is, in short, “the equation of thought and thing.”
The truth is that, even if we were to accept the term post-truth, we would still need to talk about a technological post-truth, meaning both how technological interference is used to confuse us and how we allow ourselves to be misled when our feelings are confirmed by the version of the facts that is provided to us. For example, if we see something that leads us to conclusions that contradict what we already believe, we tend to ignore it or dismiss it, lest it conflict with our preconceived notions. However, when our preexisting beliefs are reinforced, we do the opposite. This is not because we are contemptible, but rather because we are human, and thus vulnerable to emotional manipulation.
Consequently, it is not fair to say that this circumstance is entirely a technological problem, because it is, in fact, a human one. Foucault theorized that ideas and traditions are not judged in themselves, but in terms of the domination game that they conceal. In a way, he anticipated a current trend: that which is true or false lacks meaning when power is at stake.
There is something unhealthy in all of this, and it is nothing new. Centuries ago, wise Christians taught us that Satan is the prince of lies. It is painfully obvious that we are in profoundly satanic times given the prevalence of abortion, the proscription of truth, the widespread contempt for the dignity of human life, selfishness, arrogance, and confusion about sexual identity. It would not be unreasonable to assert that we are entering a time in which all the potential of men, all the technology, all the politics, will also end up being placed in service of the lie.
In this confusing time, immediacy is more important than truth. In the ideological and media contest, whoever wins a moral battle at eight o’clock in the evening on social networks does not care that he may lose it three days later, when it is proven to be false. By then, no one will be watching, and everyone will have formed an idea from the first impact. It is something done unconsciously while scrolling through hundreds of posts, tweets, and videos. In just a few seconds, we forge an immediate idea about what we have seen.
In the past, meeting a new co-worker or friend would begin with forming a first impression and then, three months later, realizing that first impression was so wrong that it might even cause embarrassment. That was a normal and reasonable process of becoming acquainted with someone. Today there is no such process, and no such later reflection. In ten seconds, from a newspaper headline, a tweet, or a TikTok video, we form an idea of complete strangers. It is rare that we give people a second chance if we find them unpleasant at first, and what happens with people also happens with facts. Just ten or twenty years ago, analysts, experts on the Middle East, and war correspondents would have found it insulting that anyone would pretend to understand the Israel-Gaza conflict in three seconds, drawing global conclusions from something seen in a tweet or a TikTok video. And yet we do things like that every day.
In this era of unclarity, it is essential to develop the greatest possible critical spirit, for which more training than ever is needed. As an antidote, analysts from the end of the last century were in favor of recovering the original idea of the university. “Universities exist to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and culture that will prepare them for life, while enhancing the intellectual capital upon which we all depend,” wrote Roger Scruton in “ and ” continuing with his assessment that.“ Evidently the two purposes are distinct. One concerns the growth of the individual, the other our shared need for knowledge. But they are also intertwined, so that damage to the one purpose is damage to the other.”
It seems more complicated to demand standards of truth from journalists. Impartial journalism, which complements opinion journalism, has lost ground due to a reality that we cannot hide: demand for it has fallen. In reality, almost nobody wants to know the facts. This should not be surprising. The most influential people who do not accept facts are our politicians, and hence they make their decisions about our future based on post-truths. Given that this is the case, what value could unbiased and objective journalism have for ordinary people? The Left has proven a thousand times that militancy and noise are more persuasive than reason and silent truth.
With the triumph of partisan journalism, along with all of its pros and cons, most journalists no longer leave university with a journalistic vocation, but rather with one of militancy. They are also people of the world—children of their time, not angels—and their time is the time of post-truth and the cult of lies, if that will allow them to achieve more power. In the field of journalism, power is information—it doesn’t matter whether it is true or not, only that it is persuasive.
What remains—the only thing that could save us—is a call to individuals to free themselves from the lies that might enslave them, and to understand that their freedom is at stake. We are not made for lies and, if we go back to the classical definitions of St. Thomas Aquinas, it makes no sense to live with our backs turned to the knowledge of things. Doing so may be effective in the very short term, but it will damage our judgment, our reputation, our way of understanding reality, and our personal integrity, if not our conscience itself.
There is a sign, perhaps something even providential, in the fact that so many universities and institutions throughout the world have as their motto Veritas vos liberabit—the truth will set you free. It is a motto more relevant than ever, in this time of mass lies fabricated with the help of AI.
