Finding truth? Now might be the time to panic

Even after the most deliriously mendacious news conference in the history of the United States graced the White House last week, the very existence of truth might not be in such doubt if it were subjected to merely one or perhaps several attacks, rather than nearly every attack imaginable.

Let’s suppose liberal democracies were solely concerned with the propensity of trolls, say, Kremlin-sponsored ones, to spread easily disproven lies online. Well, fine, then — we’d disprove them. Fake news is why God invented fact-checkers.

Now, if growing ranks of partisans were to accept easily disproven lies as true even after those lies had been disproven — easily — we might be a little more bewildered. How strange, we’d think, to accept as true what’s patently untrue. But the partisan mind is a closed one; the rest would get on with reading the newspaper and talking about the facts learned therein with other people who enjoy the occasional newspaper and fact.

We might get nervous, of course, if fewer people were reading newspapers. It could mean fewer voters accessing shared facts on which to base collective decisions. But our nerves would be soothed by the assurance that emerging models for mainstream media would broadcast the truth.

What if, though, the longawaited saviour of mainstream media didn’t show up? What if media began splintering into many inadequate parts each catering to different tastes, aggravating partisanship and never adding up to anything approximating the whole truth? We still wouldn’t have reason to panic. Just reason to fear the truth was marginalized. Marginalized, at least, is not demonized.

Unless, that is, it were also demonized. This may sound crazy, but imagine that the leader of a major democracy were indeed crazy. Suppose that central to his particular brand of crazy was a fear of criticism so strong it manifested in his reflexively telling whatever bald-faced lie he thought might protect his delicate ego. Suppose that when his lies were exposed by the people employed to expose them, he personally maligned them as liars and the truth as a lie. Suppose further that other politicians in other democracies deployed his pathology as strategy. Well, we would calm ourselves with the knowledge that politicians must still take journalists’ questions, of course.

Only they must do no such thing. Not if the electorate doesn’t care. Should politicians sense that frustrated voters would happily scapegoat messengers of uncomfortable truths, politicians would speak only to friendly journalists; they might even openly equate friendliness with truthfulness. They might flaunt their ability to shut the truth out.

Now might be the time to panic.

It would not, however, be occasion for utter despair. A big barrier still stands between free society and rank ignorance. A liberal democracy may tolerate the proliferation and widespread acceptance of lies, as well as the depletion, mockery and shunning of those who tell the truth — indeed, to a great extent, it must — but it cannot explicitly forbid people from discovering and telling the truth.

After all, should liberal states imprison reporters and whistleblowers for telling and publishing facts, they undermine a basic liberal assumption: that even if political agents are opportunistic enough to present lies as truth, that even if people are partisan enough to reject the truth, that even if politicians are cynical enough to malign those who broadcast the truth, and that even if governments are self-serving enough to restrict access to the truth, at least liberal democracies will uphold people’s right to speak the truth.

And yet. In the United States, the president threatens to expand already unreasonably draconian anti-whistle-blowing policies. In Canada, Vice journalist Ben Makuch may be jailed for protecting his sources while police secretly surveil others. In the United Kingdom, government advisers propose prosecuting journalists for obtaining sensitive information.

We don’t live in a post-truth era. Liberal democracies flirt with the possibility, though, subjecting the truth to nonsensical attacks, mindless conspiracy theories, industry crises and petty grievances. It must not be snuffed out by, of all things, the law.