Post-truth is a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21st century.
[1][2][3][4][5] Oxford Dictionaries popularly defines it as "relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
The latter might be considered the most prominent theory of truth, though with its share of critics, whereby words correspond to an accepted or mutually available reality to be examined and confirmed.
When people debate whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussain's Iraq, whether global warming is real and anthropogenic, or whether austerity is necessary, their disagreements are not the consequence of competing theories of truth.
For most of human history, there was some stable combination of trust in religious texts and leaders, learned experts and the enduring folk wisdom called common sense.
[16] Not all commentators, however, treat post-truth as a historically specific phenomenon discussed through implicit correspondence, coherence, or pragmatist theories of truth.
Nietzschean perspectivism denies that a metaphysical objectivism is anything possible and asserts that there are no objective evaluations capable of transcending any cultural formation or subjective designations.
Here Latour discusses the discovery in 1976, by French scientists working on the mummy of the pharaoh Ramses II, that his death was due to tuberculosis.
Latour argues that it would be an anachronism to assert that Ramses II was killed by machine-gun fire or died from the stress provoked by a stock-market crash.
[22]In this sense, Latour (or Michel Foucault[23] as well) draws attention to the institutional and practical contingencies for producing knowledge (which in science is always changing at slower and faster rates).
Hannah Arendt has been cited as an important conceptual resource for post-truth theory in that she attempted to theorize something historically shifting, instead of meditating on the nature of truth itself.
[24] In her essay Lying in Politics (1972), Hannah Arendt describes what she terms defactualization, or the inability to discern fact from fiction[25] – a concept very close to what we now understand by post-truth.
Her main target of critique is the professional "problem-solvers" tasked with solving American foreign policy "problems" during the Vietnam War, and who comprised the group that authored the McNamara report.
This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.
Arendt faults the Vietnam era problem-solvers with being overly rational, "trained in translating all factual contents into the language of numbers and percentages",[29] and out of touch with the facts of "given reality.
On the other hand, in a defactualized environment, the individual "loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which will still catch up with him because he can remove his mind from it but not his body.
She spoke of a "recent variety" added to "the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past: the apparently innocuous one of the public-relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue."
This importation from consumer society to politics was problematic, according to Hannah Arendt, for public relations "deals only in opinions and 'good will,' the readiness to buy, that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
In the context of politics, post-truth has recently been applied to the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, Brexit, the COVID-19 "infodemic", and the conditions that led to the storming of the US capital on January 6, 2021.
If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions... Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.