Food for Thought – Post-truth

An idea, a book, a concept, a “matter to think about” that we share with you to open reflection, discover new subjects and lead you to (re)think from another angle.

One can deal in a thousand and one ways with the truth: one can refute it, hide it, reduce it, caricature it, confiscate it, falsify it, revise it, manipulate it, simulate it, rig it. Or what remains much simpler, quite simply lie. All these more or less toxic regimes that we impose on it to serve such or such interest have one point in common: they suppose that we still accept the reign and even the sovereignty of truth. It is quite different with post-truth: here you enter the kingdom of those who have gone out of the circle of truth, who deny it any value to relegate it to the antique shop.

There are those who contest the regime of truth and those who mock it, those who revolt against it and those for whom it no longer has foundation nor justification nor value. In other words, there are those who fight it and those who neglect it. Post-truth is the kingdom of the latter.

The word is consecrated by the Oxford Dictionary in 2016. It designates there “any discourse established in circumstances where objective facts are less important to forge the debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and belief.” Claudine Tiercelin, holder of the chair of philosophy of knowledge at the Collège de France, recalls this definition in her synthesis on the subject titled Post-truth or the disgust of the true. The little prefix post before truth means that this one is no longer the ultimate criterion of reason, judgment, discernment.

Symptom of our time, truth would thus have become a demonetized value, negligible, almost anti-modern. To really understand the phenomenon, one must begin by distinguishing post-truth from its simulacra. It is neither sophism, nor cynicism, nor lying, nor falsification, nor babble or bluff, even if it does not hesitate to borrow from all these ruses of reason. The sophist is ready to betray the truth to have the last word and win the rhetorical game, the liar knows that he deliberately alters the truth to obtain such or such result, the babbler, thinking only of staging himself, mocks the true as well as the false because bullshit, babble, does not rest on falsity but on imposture. “The babbler counterfeits things but that does not mean that they are erroneous” you will read in H. Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit.

If one had to find a pioneer of the analysis of post-truth it would no doubt be Guy Debord who, analyzing our consumer society in The society of the spectacle, noted: “Our time prefers the image to the thing, the representation to the reality. What is sacred for it is illusion and what is profane is truth.” In politics, it is Presidents Bush then Trump and his famous fake news who popularized and trivialized it.

Post-truth is this regime where anything can be held as true on simple ideological or affective presuppositions and where anyone can end up believing things while knowing that they are false. It rests on false but solid postulates. There is no outside-text (1): which means that reality does not exist independently of what one says or writes about it. Truth is a matter of perspective (2): and each individual having a perspective on the world, it is therefore structurally relative. There are no facts, only interpretations (3): this third postulate flows from the previous. Each fact contains in it an alternative fact that must be revealed to confirm what one already believes (3 bis). Things do not exist independently of what we feel of them or what we believe of them (4). In a reasoning, it is the conclusion that determines the argument and not the inverse (5). One understands that with such postulates it is the whole rational dynamic and the logic of knowledge that are distorted, vitiated, undermined. For since Plato, for there to be knowledge it is necessary not only that there be true beliefs but that these beliefs be justified, that is to say accompanied by reason.

Post-truth pertains, and it is indeed in this that it is much more dangerous than lying, sophism, bluff, imposture, to a post-rational strategy which aims, specifies judiciously Claudine Tiercelin, to “break the relation between language and reality, prevent any access to objective truth, in order to destroy the very conditions of freedom.” By disengaging us from the sense of truth, from its search as from its respect, it also disengages us from any responsibility. Under its reign, we are no longer accountable for anything and have no longer to answer to anything or anyone. What tremendous freedom!

Exacerbated by social media, post-truth is thus much more than a big disruption of common discernment, a conspiracist impulse, a passing disorder of communication: it represents a triple existential threat, for reason, for science and for democracy. The day when the whole world will have been disgusted of the true, what will remain of the world? And of us?