The problem is that we know too much

As problematic as “fake news” is, and as dangerous as the label can be, maybe “true news” is equally corrosive. The world is giving us more reality and more truth than we can comfortably handle — and that, as much as the lack of a common enemy since the end of the Cold War, may explain the decline of the liberal world order.

Fake news, after all, has been with us for a long time, whether in the form of overly optimistic dispatches from the Vietnam War or reports of Paul McCartney’s death. And that’s not counting the under- or unreported stories we now know to be true, on such things as Kennedy’s affairs, or Reagan’s dementia.

Back then, you couldn’t even google the right answer — yet somehow we coped. What we did have, at least in the US and most of the West, was a relatively well-centred culture, which gave people perspective and a series of unifying national “myths”.

Even if the US never was quite the land of the free and the home of the brave, it helped that most people believed it was.

Fast-forward to the current day. Probably the single biggest change in American life has been a dramatic decline in the cost and inconvenience of getting information. On just about every topic, it is possible to get access to virtually every possible point of view, usually at zero marginal cost.

And the truest, biggest news concerns the failings of our elites. I am not referring just to US elites. Whatever specific failings they may have, there is a more general problem with elites: they are held responsible for the success or failure of the larger society.

This is not always fair, because business cycles are hard to forecast or prevent, foreign affairs do not always go well and bad luck can scuttle the best of plans. But today’s elite no longer have the cultural shield that once made it harder for outsiders to take a crack at them.

The world of the internet is reporting on the failures of the elites 24/7. And while pretty much every opinion is available, some have more resonance than others. Is it not the case that, post-2008, most people really are sceptical of the ability of American elites to prevent the next financial crisis?

There is another way that this surfeit of information harms the reputation of elites. Say you discover Brilliant Person X and want more exposure to X’s brilliant ideas. So you decide to follow X on Twitter — and discover that X is not, in fact, impressive in every respect, and perhaps harbours some partisan prejudices, too. It’s not quite that you have discovered that the emperor has no clothes. But perhaps you have noticed that he (or she) is missing a few critical garments.

It’s hard to stay idealistic these days, as information indeed is the enemy of idealism.

Instead of today’s swamp of negativism, do you not instead long for a few rousing hymns, a teary rom-com happy ending, a non-ironic exhibit of wonderful landscape paintings? Yet all these cultural forms are largely on the wane. It’s no accident that the successful romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians is set in Singapore.

If you doubt that truth itself is the problem, just ask yourself: how much would it demoralise you to read the truth about yourself, all day long? Even if most of those reports were positive? Pretty demoralising, I’d bet. That, in a nutshell, is the predicament of the West. — Bloomberg

Even if the US never was quite the land of the free, it helped that most people believed it was