I’m worried about this post-truth label. It seems to have gathered a lot of credence in a very short period and I don’t like the picture it paints.
First though, as was pointed out to me, we haven’t exactly been living in a present-truth world for the last few decades, have we? Have we all been praising politicians and industry for their close adherence to the facts of every matter, and to the evidence of their cases? I must have missed it if we were.
In fact the term goes back quite a long way – at least back to 2004 and I guess much further back.
It seems to me that we only live in a post-truth world if we choose to, and if we let it happen. And by ‘we’ I do mean we, the public, but I also mean NGOs.
We need to make the truth work for us. And I’m sure we can.
Let’s think about it and see what progress we can make through this year.
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The truth is and has always been the best weapon we have lets make it count. Post truth is the road to defeat and acceptance of a world as others see it.
The people who know the truth need to work harder than ever to get it across. That’s the challenge!
Read Chomsky, he has been bagging on about this since the sixties.
Indeed isn’t Orwell’s 1984 about exactly this.
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/05/14/post-truth-politics/
Richard Murphy’s blog on the subject is interesting and yes, he says just that re Orwell.
What actually amazes me is, in the continuous media circus that flits from one subject to another over time, how even they seem to forget relatively recent history. The pundits in the media circus want to portray their understanding of the situation according to a narrative, and history, everything else that has happened in the past, relevant to the subject is totally forgotten. It is amazing that they do this every time. I suppose that this is exactly “post truth reality.”
I for one, could make quite long winded arguments with these pundits and I often summarise what I think to people on Twitter, but doesn’t it make you wonder about MOST peoples critical skills? I find that very worrying. I strongly feel that most people are basically quite lazy and look for simplistic solutions to problems, for example anti refugee rhetoric is much easier than accepting a degree of responsibility in creating the refugees in the first place, because of the complicity of our own government in destabilising the regions in our own interests (oil mainly).
The Syrian refugee crisis is actually the perfect example of this.
Harold Pinter states in his Nobel speech, Art,Truth and Politics
“Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory [of the artist] since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH96tuRA3L0
I think he goes on to mention the able support offered by corporate media(including BBC, Guardian etc) in enabling that ” tapestry of lies”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b086nzlg “Nothing but the Truth” about post truth.
Scary the experiments described here, about the holding of entrenched opinions even in the face of evidence. I guess you must have heard it mark or was it just coincidence.
Andrew – it was coincidence actually! But I do mean to go back and listen – although that only actually happens about one time in three.