Post-truth (part 9) - camouflage for an old adversary

House Under Construction
Kazimir Malevich
Source 

The emergence of the word post-truth sparks a very old philosophical question - what is truth? 

I've now written over 20,000 words in 8 posts to attempt to explain how I see truth. (A full recap and a contents page are coming.) 

My exploration has focused on how humanity pictures the concept of truth. I contend that our most common image - the metaphor of the tortuous journey to an absolute objective truth as a destination (out there) - is part of problem in thinking clearly about truth and post-truth. 

In this series, I have presented a new metaphor that is a better fit with humanity's relationship with truth - the house construction metaphor. The metaphor represents the shared process of constructing and maintaining the house - our sense of truth - and also the vulnerabilities inherent in any project that involves a lot of people. 

The house construction metaphor illustrates that truth is personal, provisional, and socially constructed by humans, and that is not only okay, it is inevitable. Our concept of truth, as I see it, is the outcome of our human needs. 

So, how does the new metaphor help in understanding post-truth? 

So finally, what is post-truth?  

As I wrote in part 1, the word post-truth was coined by playwright Steve Tesich in 1992 to describe the public complacency with the lies, corruption and deceit rampant in seedy episodes of American politics from 1970s onward. 'We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world'.   

The word was not a description of the lies, but the willingness to accept the lies by the public, the lack of consequence for the liars.  

It resurfaced in the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum when enough people accepted the candidates lies and acted (voted) on them.

Post-truth was Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2016 defined as 'Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief'. Simon Blackburn (author of On Truth) describes a post-truth world as 'a place where shared, objective standards for truth have disappeared.'

These definitions fail to answer the first question I always ask when exploring a word. 

I'm still wondering 'what kind of thing' is post-truth? Is it a thing or place (a concrete noun), a description (an adjective), and action (a verb), a concept (an abstract noun), a value (also an abstract noun laden with a moral judgement), or something else? 

The most common use I notice is that we are living IN a post-truth world or a post-truth era. This means post-truth is an adjective that describes a state of society, this time in history, or as many write, 'the world'.

Well... I look around and I still see plenty of what I call truth. In my experience, post-truth doesn't refer to 'the world' or 'society' at all. A majority doesn't accept the lies of certain politicians (but is worried about the number of people who do). The physical world is still the arbiter of our sense of reality and 'the world', e.g. people who think Covid 19 isn't real still die from it. As Simon Blackburn writes, we can't really ignore reality.

There is something useful in the word's original meaning. Post-truth refers to the willingness of enough people to accept lies and distortions of fact, to deny their own perceptions and other sources of evidence about reality when they conflict with an existing personal belief. And by 'enough' people, I mean numbers that can impact election outcomes. Enough people to form a community to share and reinforce that sense of truth.

Post-truth appears to be an adjective describing (some) people's relationship with a version of truth that is not based on the social construction of truth the rest of us have agreed to, that do not align with reality, but is instead proclaimed by a single individual (e.g. Trump, as managed by his minders) who provides and comes to represents the truth that those people need. 

So what kind of thing is post-truth? An adjective describing the human propensity to believe that things that do not align with reality are nevertheless truth. 

How did this come to be?

Recap: what is truth?

Click to view larger image

To recap this lengthy series, I think of truth as those explanatory stories constructed and shared by a community or society that all together create a meaningful picture of the world and meet the needs of human for belonging, agency and a sense of safety. 

I realise that implies that I think ANY explanatory story could be consider truth. However, as outlined in part 6 on the building code for truth, I do not think that.  

Contemporary Western society anchors truth on an agreement about the ways and means that we know truth. We have agreed to use scientific methods and inquiry, empirical observation and evidence to explore physical reality. We also use maths, logic and reason, and the coherence of an overall picture (religious, philosophical, mechanical) to make sense of both physical and social reality as we experience it. 

And that's the basis of the common definition of truth from the dictionary that I started with in part: truth is the condition of a belief or idea being in accord with fact or reality.

However, as I showed in part 4 and part 5, evidence and 'facts' about reality (as far as humans can determine them) are not sufficient for humans' sense of truth. We need meaning and explanation which we construct together through explanatory stories. And we get extremely attached to those stories of meaning, enough to deny and ignore 'facts' that might threaten the sense of safety provided by our truth. All of us do this.

Socially constructing truth meets our most important need: belonging to a community through human relationships. Human belonging and cooperation are based on sharing a sense of reality and a sense of truth, whether it aligns with physical reality or not. 

So, we define truth as 'according with reality', but that's not how we relate to truth in practice. 

We don't really know what we mean by the word truth. 

Facts still exist, but they are more and more remote

Every day, we continue to rely on scientific evidence and what we call 'facts' - every time we see a doctor, fly in a plane, use a computer, etc.; every time was take the advice of a psychologist, dietitian, lawyer, etc. in making a decision about our lives. Even those who have accepted the post-truth 'world' provided by people like Trump (as a tool for his various puppet masters), still rely on facts about reality for basic activities of life (like using an elevator up Trump Towers. 

But our relationship with facts is uncomfortable in two important ways.

The gap between the facts that each of us knows and what the world collectively knows has grown rapidly. Combined human knowledge about the physical and social world has exploded in the last century, with lots of the information being quite remote from everyday existence. Relative to how much is 'known', we are each becoming less knowledgeable. 

Secondly, the systems that provide our food, clothing and other needs, the networks that influence economic prosperity and the global climate (for example) are opaquely complex and interconnected. Every routine decision (e.g. what clothes to buy) involves possible contradiction with things we desire or value (e.g. not hurting other people). And we humans really, really dislike complexity and contradiction, so we look away. 

We don't really understand the world; we're told by people in white coats that we can't rely on what we directly perceive to make sense of reality; we are disconnected from the reality of essential things such as electricity and our food supply; we don't know how things we use every day actually work; whenever we settle on an understanding of something we see, someone will be able to contradict it (See footnote 4 in part 5).

It's overwhelming. And unsettling to think about.

We are unable to use such complexity and detail to predict and plan for the future. We can't integrate it into our shared explanatory stories that make sense of the world and allow us to feel safe. 

We just have to have faith in what other people tell us - we have to have faith in science, experts, legal advice, politicians, etc., without understanding it. 

But we continue to have a need for control and certainty about the world, despite the information to achieve this being beyond (all of) us. We need to share a sense of reality with others upon which to rest our own sanity. 

When 'facts' don't prove to be up to that vital job, we fall back on belief and intuition, and what feels like the best available explanatory story. 

For humans, truth is more than alignment with reality

The idea that science can discover all the important facts to lead us to an objective, absolute truth has always been an overreach. It assumes that 'facts' equal 'truth', when truth has never meant that to humanity. 

There is a fundamental distinction between facts and reasoning (to describe what is observed) and emotion and meaning (to explain and justify behaviour, values, purpose, morals, ethics and aesthetics). We humans are capable of both, we use both constantly, but we are drawn much more to the latter.  

As detailed in this series, science and its observations lack a key ingredient necessary for truth as humans need it: an explanatory story that makes sense of the world, and creates a meaningful picture of being a person in the world.  

The problem with science, facts and evidence as a potential source of truth is partly its complex and remoteness, partly that its 'stories' are staid and boring to most, but critically that it is independent of humanity, and provides no sense of meaning. 

Which brings us to truth as it has been 'known' for millennia. 

When wasn't the world post-truth?

As the prefix post- means 'after', one has to ask: if this implies an 'era' after truth, when, exactly, was the golden age of truth? 

History reveals that what humanity has consider to be truth has rarely had much alignment with what we now call 'scientific facts'. According to Yuval Noah Harari (author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century), the ability to create shared fictional explanatory stories - in the form of religions, fables, folk wisdom, novels, ideologies, propaganda, national identities, etc., that have little alignment to objective 'facts' - is the most important human tool for social cooperation and co-existence in large communities.  

Psychology and the work of Bernays and other manipulators of truth (see part 7) confirm that convincing people to accept 'truth that does not align with facts' is all too easy, when that 'truth' meets various fundamental human needs. A century of public relations work has succeeded precisely because 'objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief'.

That, you may remember, is the Oxford Dictionary's definition of post-truth.

Post-truth, then, seems to be humanity's default setting.

If anything, the prefix post- refers to an absurd belief in the fiction that we used to live in an era of truth, when facts, logic, reason, science, etc. were the entirety of how we understood the world. But we have never done that. The word refers to our fallacious belief that we were heading toward an objective truth, but now, sadly, something has gone wrong.

Humans prefer power and control over facts. We spend more effort trying to control the world than on trying to understand it as it is. 

Harari links the concept of post-truth to religion and politics throughout the ages. He says that relying on facts and achieving power are not compatible. Paraphrasing his words to use the language of this blog series: 

If you want power, you will have to urge people to believe your explanatory stories - your own created fictions - about the world. If you want to seek out the truth about the world, you will have to forgo power. You would have to rely on 'facts' about complexity and interconnectedness that will dishearten followers and undermine the explanatory stories that provide social stability and harmony.

Indeed, patently false stories have an inherent advantage over a set of dry facts if you want to enlist and unite people. Requiring people to believe an irrational fiction (like national identity, racial superiority, etc.) with all its accompanying emotion creates much stronger bonds and group loyalty between people and a leader, than asking them to believe in a set of boring facts (that is, if those 'facts' even exist).

New word for an old thing

The 'new' word post-truth is not about a recent loss of trust in 'facts'; it's not about our beloved reason losing out to irrational emotion. We describe the wrong thing entirely when we focus on 'lies', 'the people', 'society' or 'the world'.

We struggle to be effectively define post-truth because we are unclear about what truth is and how we know the truth. We think it is about factual information. We label post-truth statements as lying, fantasy, distortion, fact-free, delusion, spin. 

I think post-truth is a sloppy word to describe an extremely old and dangerous phenomenon: the pursuit of power through controlling people's sense of truth. 

We try to counter post-truth with fact-checking and appeals to look at what is real. 

Recap on propaganda

Propagandists know what is real. 

They lie and gaslight and fabricate an 'alternative' reality because they know that power comes from determining the truth. 

Propaganda is not merely lies and distortion; it is a conscious and deliberate attempt to control truth, to become the source of truth, and to prevent or censure other sources of information that usually contribute to the social construction process. It involves a direct attack on the standards of thought that underpin our agreement on reality. 

The actions of those accused of driving 'the world' to a post-truth state meet the definition of propaganda proposed in part 8: the effort to supplant the social construction of truth, and replace it with the propagandist as the single source of truth.  

In part 8, I used the house construction metaphor to illustrate that propagandists aim to supplant the social construction of truth with their own version - attacking the substance of the metaphoric floor and its foundations, replacing the wall of explanatory stories, discarding and denigrating the building code - so that 'society' (or at least enough people) loses its sense of a shared reality and are willing to turn to the truth provided by the propagandist. 

Propaganda provides alternative explanatory stories to replace the lost sense of reality. It knocks down most of the metaphoric house to do so, and to outsiders, those replacement Acrow props holding up the roof look temporary and shaky. 

What sets the propagandist apart from other forms of persuasion is preventing people from considering opposing points of view - labelling contradiction and corrections as 'fake news', accusing media with contrary views of reality of being part of the (self-serving) Establishment, swamp dwellers, The Elite - and generally destroying trust in other sources of information. The propagandist claims the singular role of interpreting reality, gradually and insidiously weakening the 'value' of the reality we perceive and experience, and damaging our sense that truth requires any alignment with reality.

It's not hard to do, we barely think about the metaphoric 'floor' upon which our truth rests. We don't know how we know what truth is.

After disputing other sources of truth sufficiently, after messing with our perception and our shared explanatory stories sufficiently, the propagandist can place him/herself as the source of truth.¹

People have attempted to control the truth throughout history (The Roman Empire had 'fake news' too). It's a tried and true strategy to convince people to believe you, to dominate a society, and take ultimate power.  

Propaganda welcomed it into our homes

We tend to think of propaganda as what the Nazis did to gain power over the German people in the lead up to WWII. As a result, there seems to be a tendency to assume the aim of any propagandists must be authoritarianism.

In contrast, Bruno Maçães says that the efforts of people like Trump (acting as a puppet of others) to control truth is actually spectacularly 'performative conservatism' as part of the USA's long-standing preference for fantasy stories about itself, particularly about the more distasteful aspects of its own history. Yes, it's anti-democratic, but whether it's intentionally proto-fascist, I'm not so sure.

In a society that defines itself as 'free' and 'open', you can't use violence to make people believe what you say, you have to be surreptitious. 

The brilliant Noam Chomsky says that one of the most important political developments and social drivers of the last century is corporate propaganda. It has assumed enormous proportions and influence as wealthy corporate bosses protect their power against policies that might be implemented in a genuine and functional democracy. 

The USA (dragging many other Western countries with it) is a case study of non-violent propaganda wielded against the people. It has achieved this with the happy cooperation of the people, willing to accept a 'post-truth world' to ensure they can maintain the fantasy explanatory stories it tells itself. 

Contemporary propaganda reflects a century of research into manipulating truth via the public relations and advertising industries (discussed in part 7). Research has demonstrated the ease with which people's sense of truth can be exploited, and has tapped into humanity's propensity and willingness to be deceived in order to feel safe. The recent successes of overt 'strategic lying' show that anyone who wants to manipulate truth to control what people do - anyone - can do so. 

No overt violence required. 

Deranged populist politicians are only one aspect of contemporary propaganda. Other players, like Fox News (and Sky News) attract and persuade viewers with democratic-sounding slogans and ideals, but take them to distorted and destructive conclusions. Media like the Fox empire work in the service of a specific ideology: part corporate kleptocracy, part white supremacy.  

And we turn on our TVs to invite it into our home. 

So post truth is propaganda

I wrote above that post-truth appeared to be an adjective describing the human propensity to believe that things that do not align with reality are nevertheless truth. Given what this series has explored about truth, that seems an inadequate definition.

The word post-truth has emerged, not as a belated and welcome acknowledgement of the nature of humanity's relationship with truth, but a new camouflage word for propaganda. Propaganda without the violence and overt censorship that we may have associated with this word. 

People generally are concerned and alert to propaganda. Failing to label it correctly allows it to flourish. 

Western propaganda aims to replace 'boring' reality and the inevitable suffering of so many in a neo-liberal society with a fantasy of something much more appealing. Daniel Boornstin links the widespread use of image-driven advertising to a population with a 'mania for more greatness than there is in the world.' A population that satisfies this mania with hyper-reality events, social media performance, influencers, massive overconsumption, exploitative holidays, and a willing retreat into fantasy about itself and its history. A population primed for the fantasy of a propagandist. 

Post-truth is propaganda - a version of the truth provided by one person. Trump et al (and their controllers) provide satisfying explanatory stories, disregard complexity and soothe people's confusion, identify simple cause and effect and a straightforward course of action, and the relief of having agency in one's life again, to make decisions and feel safe. The version of truth provided in the post-truth 'world' is a coherent meaningful image of the world, built and personified by one person (in front of their team). 

As I wrote in Part 5, no one lets go of their established sense of meaning easily. They will happily undertake mental gymnastics and ignore the evidence of their own eyes to hold onto it.

That is why facts and fact-checking are not counterarguments to those who are sold on propaganda, have accepted a conspiracy theory, bought into a warped historical account, or see malice in every action of government (The Establishment). 

Fact-check all you like, the lies are not the problem

Defining truth as a simple alignment with reality leads us to think that facts are the counter to any version of 'un-truth'. In a 'free' and 'open' society, we might rely on 'free speech' and an open media etc., to work as an antidote to lies and distortions of facts.

However, as we've seen, calling out lies, fact-checking ludicrous statements, pointing to lack of alignment with reality has little impact on 'post-truth' believers. It fails to address the underlying propaganda strategy. The aim of a lie is to convince someone that a falsehood is true. In contrast, the aim of post-truth propaganda is to dominate the populace. It is a strategy to take power. 

Post-truth propaganda works by providing an explanatory story of hope and fear. It constructs a shared sense of truth that is essential for a sense of safety. The propagandist plays on people's hope for something better (job safety, wealth, peace, heaven etc.) and fear (job loss, poverty, mental ill health, hell, etc.). Post-truth propaganda points out the enemies to hate and the future glory for those who accept this version of truth. And the people cheer!

The counter to a propagandist's lies and distortion is not a bunch of facts, it is an alternative explanatory story of hope and fear. 

Both truth and post-truth propaganda are coherent and meaningful pictures of the world that gives people hope, understanding and belonging. Facts are just facts - cold and boring.  

Everything I've written in this series explains why a fact checking, eye-rolling, name calling response to the proponents and adherents of post-truth  propaganda is futile. You don't refute claims to power - legitimate or otherwise - with facts and data. Facts are irrelevant to the agenda of the power hungry, and also to those who want desperately to believe the propagandists has the truth they have been searching for.  

Called by its real name, post-truth propaganda is an assertion of power over the social construction of truth, a denial of the social contract in agreeing on reality.

Supplanting the social construction of truth

John Keane (author of The Life and Death of Democracy) says the abuse of truth is part and parcel with the abuses of power that litter human history (and the current day). He thinks that efforts toward democracy have been humanity's best effort to challenge the ubiquitous abuse of power by leaders.

Democracy's fundamental message is that no one person has absolute control over truth. This points to the locus of power in society: the social construction of truth, and the efforts of the power-hungry to control that process. 

Post-truth propaganda insidiously infiltrates our supposedly democratic societies, and it does so in order to undermine our democratic values.

In the populist politics that we see in so many countries, the deliberate undermining of democracy may be about bringing in a fascist state; I couldn't know for sure. However, I'm more inclined to think the aim is to create a fantasy-based caricature of a democracy (slogans and images, but no substance) that gives the leaders control and power over an accepting (and cheering) populace. The aim is personal wealth and power, replacing bothersome democracy with an easy kleptocracy.

Dr Simon Longstaff says: 'Without truth, no democracy can stand. This is because without truth there can be no informed consent, because without truth there can be no informed citizens.'  

Why we should care about how we know truth

We fail to identify post-truth as propaganda because we don't understand our relationship with truth.

Post-truth propaganda is a campaign to screw up people's sense of how they know truth. As I said in part 8, propaganda works to first destroy and denigrate the processes and relationships that are inherent in the social construction of truth, then provide a version of truth manifest by one person. This version of truth is appealing because it meets fundamental human needs for belonging, agency, and feeling safe. 

Post-truth is non-violent insidious propaganda aimed at destroying our social agreement for truth, and supplanting it with the truth of the propagandist. 

And this is why we should care about truth. With a vague and misleading idea of what truth is (absolute, objective, out there), we fail to understand what post-truth propaganda is. We focus on the substance and content of the claims of the propagandists, not on the power abuse inherent in declaring a single person as the source of truth.

Post-truth is propaganda in full flight - a grab for political power through controlling how we agree on reality. 

How on earth can we counter that with facts?  

Footnotes

1. Hannah Arendt contends propaganda will work at different times depending on the conditions if life. Individuals and populations are more vulnerable at times to needing and wanting the shelter of the propagandists' proclaimed truth. This is why material conditions matter, why a simplistic explanation about 'why things suck' can get traction. 

Images 

• Painting of House Under Construction [Stroyuschiysya dom] by Kazimir Malevich 1915-16 from Arts and Culture 
• Simon Blackburn quote created by the author from 'A philosopher explains America’s 'post-truth' problem' at https://www.vox.com/2018/8/14/17661430/trump-post-truth-politics-philosophy-simon-blackburn 
• House construction metaphor for truth by the author
• Shit you know: snipped from social media, no source
• Daniel Kahneman quote created by the author from text in The Guardian article 16 May 2021  
• Fiction and reality cartoon by Nathan W Pyle posted on December 9, 2020 at Facebook post 
• Experts by Yanni Davros at https://prolificpencomics.net/comic/experts/ 
• Timothy Snider interview post by The Daily Show 12 January 2021 at https://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow 
• Chomsky quote on indoctrination https://noam-chomsky.tumblr.com/post/129557916045  
• James Murdoch quote taken from text in The Guardian article 16 Jan 2021
• Nietzsche quote: snipped from social media, no source
• I saw a post the other day: snipped from social media, no source
• Chomsky quote on propaganda at QuoteFancy https://quotefancy.com/quote/33296/Antoine-de-Saint-Exup-ry-If-you-want-to-build-a-ship-don-t-drum-up-the-men-to-gather-wood 
• Adam Savage quote from Urban Dictionary https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%20reject%20your%20reality%20and%20substitute%20my%20own.