Post-reality

When we look at the world we like to believe in Truth (with a capital T). The notion that there is a rulebook that exists, which we adhere to, and the adherence to it will guarantee our correctness. When we converge on a Truth, we know it is universally correct. For example we know that gravity exists, and it is True that it is always influential while on earth. Unfortunately, as humanity has begun to confront more difficult challenges, we have begun to realize this view is (mostly) incorrect. At least that’s the claim of the more post-modern belief of post-truth.

What is Post-Truth?

Post-truth can refer to several phenomenon. The first of which is that as a society we have recognized that truth can exist in different forms, and that perception/circumstances massively can change this. For example is it “better” that a person becomes a doctor instead of a janitor. There are many different criteria that can get at the heart of this question, and can lead you to either answer. There is no Truth (capital T), that is universal. In this iteration of the phenomenon, the notion of challenging Truth is challenging simply the universal notion of truth, in all situations. It’s a relatively mild critique that largely boils down to a recognition of human bias, and the propensity to consider our own perspective as “true”. It does little to dispel things like scientific progress, or “laws of nature”.

The second version of this phenomenon is however more insidious, and a part of the topic of this article. It refers to a more intentional effort on the part of propogandists to use the observations of the first type of post-truth, to erode the notion of truth in general. For example take a statement like “I read online you shouldn’t eat vegetables”. This statement has a possibility to be true, in an incredibly limited set of contexts. For example if it was uttered in response to someone mentioning they’re going to a country without safe drinking water, then you probably shouldn’t eat the vegetables if they’ve been washed in that water. Being less charitable, if the person is referring universally to eating vegetables being bad, we now have a problem. For some people this issue can be a mistake, or a lack of information. This is easily corrected by just providing the necessary information to dispel the belief. For others they are likely the victim of Post-Truth thinking.

Usually the person will respond to critiques of their position with something approximating “I read it from someone I trust”, or more combatively “what do you know”, or worse yet “scientists have been wrong before, why should I believe them”. You will notice in all these cases the truth of the statement is not a matter of anything easily falsifiable. In the three examples above, to convince the person I would need to either:

1. Convince them the person they “trust” is untrustworthy. Which is unlikely.
2. Convince them I am some sort of “expert” in the field with an understanding, up to and/or surpassing the person they read online
3. That even though scientists have been wrong, they are not wrong about this

All three, while possible, are not something most average people are equipped to do. Particularly if the person they are getting their “alternate facts” from, are relatively sophisticated at propaganda. This leaves us with the notion that this second form of post-truth is an intentional attempt to rewrite facts that suit a particular narrative/world-view. It is post-truth in the sense that we are now uninterested in the truth, and seeking it out, instead of the original sense that a rigid belief in “Truth” can limit “true” statements. This is concerning because we leave open the door to completely false statements being considered true.

Sex Appeal

I mentioned earlier about a lot of this being driven by propaganda, but I realize this lends a notion of intentional well-rationed conspiracy I want to dispel. I want to make it clear that I am using that as a technical term. All propaganda is meant to imply, is some sort of media that is convincing and appealing to the reader. This does not require a ton of intellect, lots of people are able to intuit propaganda techniques if they are socially well equipped and nothing more. In many cases something as simple and saccharine as “fighting the establishment” is sufficient. Much like the intellectual equivalent of fast-food, an argument such as this is appealing, tasty, and rotting.

There are limited cases where the propaganda that’s being generated is genuine. There are some people who are alternative health figures for example who die doing their practices. I don’t believe they just died in some sort of martyr defiance, they likely actually believed “all vegetables are bad”. However the existence of such instances still do not discredit the claim I will make later that most of this propaganda is done cynically, and explicitly because the progenitors of the propaganda know that people don’t know any better. A clear cut example of this is someone like Alex Jones, who explicitly stated in legal proceedings that “no reasonable person”¹ could consider his statements as being factual, a similar move to what Tucker Carlson did in his legal battles².

Many-Moons, Many-Worlds

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emile³

There is a tendency to continue discussing what people like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones have done as post-truth. The problem is that this is inaccurate, it’s too optimistic. Since most people take our first definition of post-truth, when we say they are post-truth figures, the claim is actually too lenient. These people know they are lying. That’s why they had the court cases in the first place. When watching the two of them talk about topics they often times build on top of each other. It’s not just that facts are irrelevant, reality itself is irrelevant. I have written previously about Kierkegaard, but to recap briefly here, Kierkegaard discusses a notion of the possible and the actual. The possible is anything in our mind, the transcendental aspects of life that don’t actually exist. The actual on the other hand is just what exists, with nothing extra.

In a traditional view of the world we could say that the possible is where we have ideas, and the actual is where we have actions. As such the actual can act as an error checking system for the possible. When we believe that something will happen, the actual will confirm if these assumptions were correct or not through experience. If you believe you can fly, and that all you need to do so is some cardboard wings, that idea can flourish in the possible. When you try it in the actual however, you’re probably going to crack a rib or two on the pavement. Unfortunately, people like Jones and Carlson have made it such that people’s actual is their fiction. When you build up enough of these lies on top of each other you don’t end up with simply a skewed view of the world, you end up with an entirely different world.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

This is why the dissuasion from the lies is nearly impossible. You should not consider any one statement made by a person in this situation as simply one statement to dispel. In many cases you have to untangle a web of lies and shared delusions that sometimes go back years. You don’t need to convince someone that eating vegetables is good, you need to convince them that publicly funded scientists aren’t lying to them to turn their son gay⁴ for… reasons? or that scientists are lying to you about dinosaurs to discredit the bible⁵. You may be wondering what this has to do with eating vegetables, and that’s the worst part of all this, it has nothing to do with it, and everything.

Post-reality is not the same animal as post-truth. It’s not about being wrong, or intentionally lying about a fact, it’s about fundamentally altering a persons entire perception of the world piece by piece. The house of cards is built on top of one flimsy statement after another, and eventually the person presenting the post-reality has sublimated the world out from under the victim. Vegetables are bad because the government hates you, and we know the government hates you because of the twelve anecdotal stories I’ve been told in the past by this person I trust.

Burn the idiots

There is a tendency based on what I’ve said to conclude that people should be punished in some way for holding these beliefs. If anyone has read My last article, I reviewed a statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.

• Letters from prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer (p. 43)⁶

This implies that these post-reality worlds need to be reconciled into one, and that we need to remove the rest. To a very limited extent I would agree, but we cannot also forget that the original meaning of post-truth is important. We must recognize that there are things that are subject to perception/circumstances. For these situations we cannot be overly zealous in attacking people, in particular when there is an ambiguity.

However, in the most fringe of cases it’s become clear that certain facts just need to be reconciled. Similar to the original spirit of post-truth, there needs to still be room for a set of established facts that actually happened in reality. These sorts of verifiable facts is a ground that must be fought for. More and more these “plain facts”, are becoming a cynical buy for power, and it is ground that can’t be ceded without consequence. It’s not a matter of opinion what someone actually said when there’s a recording, yet people are brazen enough to lie because many won’t bother to check. There can be people that manipulate and modify the footage later, but there needs to be agreement on the most important of these cases. We cannot have people who lie about the words someone used in a speech, or statement (there’s a reason we have slander/libel). But, we can have different interpretations on what “someone meant” (With the admission this is an assumption).

It’s toppling over

When the mistakes fall disproportionately on one side, it is no respect for the notion of truth to pretend that everything is even

• Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth

It has not been subtle (I hope) that this article primarily has critiques for one side of the political aisle. This is no accident. There has been an egregious amount of outright lying, and obfuscation from the American political right. Arguably it’s the poster-child for this sort of behavior. That being said it is not the only set of extremist ridiculousness that exists. The point of this article isn’t to walk away tarring and feathering groups with a post-reality label in order to ignore their arguments. It’s to look at the obvious cases and work to build something better. The truth is I don’t know how to compete with the exciting world of Alex Jones. I don’t know how to convince people the real world is interesting compared to one with vampires and reptilians around every corner to contend with. The path to stripping people of these delusional worlds is going to be long, hard, and unlikely to succeed. People love a good conspiracy, it makes the world exciting, and the boring truth just doesn’t cut it until people have to live with the consequences, even then they’re often willing to live with quite a few of them.

Conclusion

So why did I write this article? Well truth be told, one of the worst parts of this whole post-reality process is that it gaslights you into seeing patterns that aren’t real. As such, after dealing with lots of conversations with people who follow these post-truth figures, I needed somewhere to write about what I was seeing. I don’t know how to solve this problem. I only know how to help identify it, and provide language that is more specific to the phenomenon as it occurs today. Post-reality is an intentionally cynical, self-serving parasitic worldview built on top of the legitimate and mild criticisms of post-truth. As such they should be separated, and identified separately. For now, that’s the best I have to offer. Useful solutions will need to be developed, and are a matter of experimenting for now. Good luck.