For the love of God, stop talking about "post-truth"
conspicuouscognition.com
conspicuouscognition.com
Some current politicians can do that many new lies in a month. If past politicians were not matching that then things are not the same today.
Also the quality of the lie should be taken into account. A lie like Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction was (a) at least consistent with past experience (he had used poison gas on the Kurds) and (b) there was no real way for the public or press to check to see if it was true.
Compare to a modern lie like Haitian immigrants are eating pets. It's not consistent with past experience and it is something the press can actually go check. (That checking was done, it was thoroughly debunked, with even people from the claimant's own party in that area saying it was false...and yet the claimant keeps on making the claim).
That's a huge qualitative difference. It used to be to lie successfully you had lie about something where the truth would stay hidden at least for a while. When the truth did eventually come out if you wanted it to not damage you too much you had to be able to explain the lie away as faulty information or something like that.
Nowadays you can just move onto a new lie.
The opinion expressed here that nothing has changed in the world recently about how truth and politics are handled is false. With the collapse of reasonable arbiters of "truth", such as network TV anchors, who were imperfect themselves but nevertheless served as a check on the falsehoods that a political party could put out, parties have discovered that 100% bullshit 100% of the time is a workable approach to politics, and some of them are pursuing that. That was never true before.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.[1]
While people have lied forever, post-truth implies a particular style of lying.
Trump has been kind of a master of exploiting that. Like he started in politics largely by claiming Obama wasn't born in the US which got loads of coverage in spite of being obviously false. In days gone by the press would have ignored him but in the run up to 2016 he got a huge following on twitter like that and then the mainstream press were forced to report on it to keep up so every day on the nyt or similar there would be a Trump says <some dumb thing> story which kind of got him elected president.
I think it may be fading a bit in effectiveness now as people wise up - we'll see how this election goes.
Yes, propaganda and misinformation have always been there. Yes, truth is often subjective. However, things like "will drinking a bottle of soy sauce kill me" or "should I use horse deworming meds to treat a very serious viral disease" have pretty clear answers, and that's not what we see today.
...when the problem isn't that the whole idea of these is new, it's the scale. Without doing some kind of more comprehensive analysis on both the current and historical situations, you're not going to be able to prove it one way or another (so asking for proof that things are actually worse now is also just...totally impractical), but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
> [...] but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
Treatment of marginalized groups is worse now than in the past?
Could maybe be argued if you intend some time-span bound (e.g: "worse now than it has been within my lifetime"), but even still I think this thinking is falling into a couple of traps already pointed out in the article, like treating the truth as "there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction" and therefore that anyone who does not see it must be oblivious.
Today, people are taking up arms and obstructing hurricane relief efforts because they're totally convinced it's true.
People say these things because it helps them think less while, to some, giving them the veneer of thinking more.
I'm not sure how many neolib "thinkers" would have survived this rule.
> Consider, for example, the role of falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda in the invasion of Iraq or the role of false theories about economics and finance in the global financial crisis several years later.
We had a different name for this: manufactured consent.
Owing to the government's outsized control of the media, both through the "five filters" as well as a strict broadcast censorship regime constitutionally justified through scarce airwaves, the US government had incredible leeway to push their narrative. The Iraq war was itself an echo of the Vietnam War; except in Vietnam the US government was far more blatant about the lies and it was far harder for Americans to get an alternative perspective. At least with Iraq, America could point to a giant smoldering pile of rubble in the middle of lower Manhattan to justify arbitrary invasions of hostile Middle Eastern dictatorships, even if there was no evidence of Saddam actually trying to buy nukes. In contrast, Vietnam involved, among other things, the US government claiming a second destroyer attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened.
This kind of manufactured consent is arguably harder to pull off today, for a few reasons. You can easily read other countries' newsmedia now, something unthinkable pre-Internet. US and UK media was hellbent on selling you a second war in Iraq when every other country was reporting on how shoddy the evidence was[0].
On the other hand, people born into a heavily censored media environment have terrible news literacy and will believe anything once that censorship ends. This creates a new avenue for manufacturing consent, much like how republican and egalitarianism in 18th century Europe deposed hereditary nobility only to be co-opted by political extremists and conquesting dictators. If the powers that be cannot impose their own reality upon us, then they'll shatter reality, by proposing so many more alternative truths than the average person can ever hope to validate.
Speaking of the War on Terror, let's go back to the other war - the "good" one. Afghanistan is a country that is uniquely cursed with being in the way. Anyone with eyes of conquering Asia has to eventually contend with this completely worthless patch of sand in the middle of a desert. As a result, the average Afghan lives in a nightmare of having their government being completely upended every 10-20 years. America tried building a western democracy on it, but it collapsed, because nobody trusted it. Nobody trusts anything in Afghanistan, except their local warlord, who only trusts the Taliban, who only trusts God as depicted in the Quran and interpreted by extremely regressive religious scholars eager to undo the last century or so of modernity.
The "truth era", or the manufactured consent era, was one of mostly true information and people mostly willing to believe it. A heyday for lying politicians. What we did with the Internet, and in particular social media, is create a machine that can provide really high quality information, but more likely spits out random garbage. This lowers the average - we enter the "eating The Onion" era where people get pranked by obvious satire because they aren't discerning information consumers. But people don't want to start being picky about their media diets, that takes time and effort. They instead learn to distrust everything. Now we enter the Talibanization era, where people trust nothing, except their local politician, who only trusts their megadonors, who only trust God as depicted in the Bible and interpreted by extremely regressive outrage pundits eager to undo the last century or so of modernity.
[0] I suspect this is also part of why certain old monarchist anti-Americanisms have persisted in Europe.
> Owing to the government's outsized control of the media,
> people born into a heavily censored media environment
With reference to the source material Manufacturing Consent (1988)
It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion"
relying instead on capitalism maximising profits with least effort, high return clickbait articles of no substance, wholesale quoting from handed out press releases, relying on lazy reporters, relying on lazy readers.
Relying on people imagining what a book or an article might be about rather than reading and thinking about it.
(note how [Linebarger54] explicitly mentions en passant that very little in principle separates his subject, "psychological warfare", from either economic or peacetime political propaganda)
* taking great care to distinguish between administration of policy and policy of administration, of course!
To some extent, this generous interpretation and public deference would/could be applied to things like:
* Trump's "fine people" comment
* Trudeau's "Fuddle Duddle" remark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddle_duddle)
or even
* Rich Lowry and Fox's defense of his "combining" the words "migrants" and "immigrants" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Lowry)
However, the steady stream of outright fabrications/lies that now proliferate and saturate our political landscape has forced us to confront the reality that some (many?) elites just flat out lie and that many influencers know the lies and propagate them willingly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...)
10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the press to say a politician "lied", however the avalanche of false statements, doubled and tripled down on even in the face of objective reality now forces us to confront and I argue accept the assertion that we do in fact live in a "post-truth" world.
I don't want to or intend to signal out one party or world view (Trudeau was a Liberal icon), but here is JD Vance in his owns words explaining how the end justifies the means.
"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-cla...
So lies by politicians are now so normalized that some, when confronted with the truth, don't even bother to cover them.
The following are all objective facts, that are disputed because they're inconvenient to some billionaires and the tribes of sheep that follow them:
* Vaccines are not bad for you
* Climate change is real
* Pollution is bad, and some types of pollution are really bad
* Trump lost in 2020
That's what "post-truth" actually is, though. It doesn't mean objective fact doesn't exist, but it doesn't factor in to the basis of people's subjective reality. Which shouldn't be surprising given how many people believe their lives are controlled by an invisible man in the sky.
Actually, the truth often does not even exist. It is true that releasing green house gases into the atmosphere in large quantities will change the climate, but there is no truth for the question what we should do in response as that is a matter of [personal] preferences.