Behold Our Post-Truth Society—Breaking News, Broken Politics

The past three weeks of mesmerizing political news revealed one sign of societal mayhem not yet pounced upon by pundits.

“Post-truth” thinking, a virus first diagnosed in the public square eight years ago, outed itself as a major force at the highest levels of American governance. Candidates and voters alike experienced the symptoms of an outbreak, which attacks a nation’s nerves, vision, nimbleness, and sense of direction.

From the shocking presidential debate on June 27, to an assassination attempt, to GOP convention days when both parties weighed their past and future, we could no longer dismiss the chaos as just a little case of truth decay.

Both campaigns for the White House now confront plot twists less driven by well-planned tactics and more akin to epiphanies. This cultural moment reflects the maxim, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when a decade happens.”

From Definition to Domination

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the Word of the Year. Online editors defined this search-provoking adjective as “related to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The more foundational concept—truth, or conformity with reality—has preoccupied thinkers throughout history, starting with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Scripture tells us Pontius Pilate wondered what truth is, but he washed his hands of the matter. Jesus, whom he persecuted, said truth was all-encompassing, indeed liberating, and part of a package: “the way, the truth, and the life.”

In recent years, society has been washing its hands like Pilate, and the “post-truth” virus has spread across the ideological spectrum. Everyone now senses we are in perilous times. If we choose to quash this malady, we face a load of learning and reflection to heal our truthfulness. Holistic gurus might call it “truth-fullness.”

President Joe Biden accidentally told us the cure recently during one of his quotable outbursts: “Think about what you think about!” No joke! Many practitioners of post-truth strategies might want to do an examination of conscience. We all should conduct an examination of consciousness.

We can customize our own investigations into how the latest political, journalistic, and deeply personal events have swamped us with confusing thoughts, unclear facts, and amazement or frustration.

Here’s a diagnostic checklist we can apply, without claims to academic expertise from medicine, the social sciences, philosophy, or theology. These are the thoughts of punditry, which has become post-truth terrain itself.

Today’s style of consciousness allows more people to shed or redirect accountability, to escape the challenges of big-picture reality, to manipulate words and weaponize rhetoric, to rely on appearance and performance to persuade others, and to pamper ourselves with a confirmation bias enhancing power, pride, and certitude.

Too many of us find comfort in today’s unsustainable pairing of relativism (“I create reality”) and moralism (“I cure reality”), summed up as “my truth vs. your truth.”

Because knowledge and morality are deemed culturally determined, not absolute, we form fragile or fake relationships based on narcissistic identities and tribal instincts. We follow the simplistic model called “oppressor vs. oppressed” for gain, retribution, or the joy of snap-judgments.

Post-truthers seek to recruit supporters by serving up small bits of information, true or false, while they hide or cancel other bits. They promise that national success, victory, and greatness of one sort or another will unite us again. But we know better. We see a fuller reality, where unifying a country will take hard work, sacrifice, wisdom, virtue, a sense of right and wrong.

Without a hierarchy of principles to put our affairs in order, we blithely continue surfing the daily currents, still at sea.

Many advocates “dumb down” truth, citing only the facts they regard as visible, scientific, and manageable (a philosophy called positivism). They forget that only a range of opinions—ideally incorporating worldviews, experiences, and principles of human dignity—generates meaningful cooperation.

Truth-telling: A Regress Report

Recall that, on June 27, journalists had their plan for covering the debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump. They deployed teams of fact-checkers to see how many lies each candidate told, assuming this metric could credibly select an ideal leader.

But the minimalist goal of fact-checking stirred little interest compared to a flurry of deeper concerns (health, competence, etc.) more aligned with how human beings actually communicate and discern. The results of simply tallying truths proved partial, in both senses of the word.

As days passed, talking points about big ideas like democracy and authenticity similarly failed to override news consumers’ more visceral thoughts and complicated judgments. Pre-digested biases blocked agreement on paths forward. The real business of a democracy—an informed public building consensus to solve concrete problems—received too little attention.

Post-truth thinking is supposed to speed up governance by leveraging emotions, alliances, symbolism, and social media, but it’s terribly vulnerable when reality intervenes.

Now, as we see major challenges looming, hybrid thinking looks more tempting. To give governance more heft, it must incorporate real expertise and managerial diligence, shorter response times in crises and longer-term contingency planning.

Updating our political consciousness requires better listening, orderly oversight to ensure “the buck stops here,” and a hierarchy of values that forces serious decision-making, not just checking DEI or ESG boxes.

The American people are adapting by sorting out their own priorities, judging what’s most important in their own lives. At the healthiest levels of their hierarchies, where truth resides alongside mystery, many are recovering their spiritual insights—hints of divine providence and prayers for more “normalcy” among people and circumstances.

Tallies of public opinion are likely to show that confidence in authorities continues to slide, with the exception of one data point now arising in more conversations—God. Sensitivity to good and evil, life and death, and amazing grace seems necessary in today’s politics.

When secular post-truthers promote terms like “existential threat” and “America’s soul,” they may unintentionally plant seeds of faith. Of course, we don’t know how far to go toward God-talk; if we cite Him for veracity, He requires that we be humble, true to ourselves, and true to Him.  

These are steps toward our urgent mission to examine—and revitalize—our consciousness. This word refers to our individual and societal awareness of what we think about, as well as how and why. Truth must be an anchor for these thoughts.

Now a Word from Our Sages

Here are some resources we can use to begin assessing what’s absent from our own post-modern cognition.

• Truth and the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church’s long section about truth focuses on the Eighth Commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Every person is obliged to honor and bear witness to the truth. Individual dignity requires that we seek the truth and adhere to its requirements in our lives. With a few specified exceptions, everyone deserves to be told the truth. (paragraphs 2464-2499)

• The “Dictatorship of Relativism.” In a homily from 2005, Pope Benedict XVI cautions that secular societies “are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” Elsewhere, he says relativism either will lead to nihilism [“life is meaningless”] or will expand positivism “into the power that dominates everything [authoritarianism].”

• Reality, Lies, and the Liar. M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist best known for his 1978 classic of spiritual guidance The Road Less Traveled, observes that mental health is “an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” In his 1983 book, People of the Lie, he warns that Satan is “a real spirit of unreality,” aptly called “The Father of Lies.” This unholy spirit, who wins control over us when we “recruit” him for self-gain, hates the truth, does not know how to love, and wants to destroy souls.

• Lying as Self-Destructive. The noted psychologist Jordan Peterson advises in Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (and in videos) that we should always tell the truth—or at least never consciously say something false. We should acknowledge that we will seldom know “the whole truth” about something, but generating untrue ideas injects disorder into our minds. Disorganized things suffer disaster; metaphorically speaking, we all need a map to know our purpose and direction in life, and being a liar leaves holes and errors in one’s map of meaning: “It’s very psychologically dangerous to say things you know not to be true.”

• ”The Truth Will Set You Free.” This was the title of Pope Francis’s World Communications Day message in 2018. Disinformation and “fake news” must be purified by a love for the truth, including diverse discourse, encounters with the marginalized, and avid curiosity, he insists. Quoting Dostoyevsky, the pope warns that people who continually lie to themselves and others “cannot distinguish the truth within them, or around them, and so lose all respect for themselves and for others.”

We should celebrate the whole package that comes with truth-fullness, including a personal drive for excellence and honor, not mediocrity. This means accountability and accepting inconvenient, painful reality for the greater good.

Human beings shouldn’t ignore our natural preference for truth that is served whole. Often, the “facts” in headlines are mere morsels. They should whet our appetite, not encourage or allow snap-judgments about the meal.

We must figure out how to employ and enjoy words with respect—to interpret a speaker with emotional intelligence, even empathy. Dostoyevsky’s warning should be heeded, knowledge needs to be vetted, and much talk needs to be taken literally.

But also ask: Is the person exaggerating, simplifying, or misleading in an attempt to score a point (and disconnect us from reality) or to make a point (respecting us, but prone toward hyperbole and rhetorical sloppiness)?

Our listening should be equitable, not singling out opponents for a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” as utilized in post-modern critical theory.

Discourse should be based in love, and “love always communicates,” says Pope Francis in another World Communications Day message (2019). We assume consciousness is an individual’s sole possession, but our best thinking takes place in the context of solidarity—expanding out to the local and global community, digital and face-to-face conversations, and our communion with God.

This builds trust, while post-truth information strategies do not. We need transparency between organizations and the public. Sharing the pursuit of truth, and acknowledging missteps, will open up our minds and create common ground for solving problems.

Bari Weiss, a liberal journalist and media entrepreneur, recently delivered a TED Talk about the need for Americans to express their views with courage. It’s clear she saw manipulative tendencies spreading before the past few weeks of political news.

As presented in her July 2 “Honestly” podcast, her talk explained how she began to feel unwelcome in some progressive circles, where “fringe” elements tried to constrain the content of public dialogue.

“Truth is a process, sustained by a culture of questioning, including self-questioning,” she says. “My theory is that the reason we have a crisis is because of the people who know better—because of the weakness of the silent, or rather self-silencing, majority.”

She acknowledges, “Speaking up is hard” because it makes us vulnerable. “It exposes you as someone … who makes judgments, someone who discerns between right and wrong, between better and worse.”

But we must communicate if we “want to live in a world that values justice, wisdom, compassion, curiosity, rationality, equality, and the pursuit of truth,” Weiss says. Americans have worked hard to shed hateful dialogue and to “solve our conflicts with words.” It’s often counter-productive to decry free speech as verbal victimization.

Weiss should have the last word here. Since recent weeks have revealed a post-truth virus decaying constructive thought, we need to rebuild consciousness using “the most radical tools in human history”—namely, dynamic exchanges about reality. Of course, they must be nurtured with charity. “Love and compassion [are] only possible if we agree to a certain set of tools many of us took for granted.”

Image from the AI “Designer” function of Microsoft Bing.

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