A post-truth world endangers our country
Just about everybody’s heard of Big Brother. George Orwell’s vision was of an omnipresent central government long having seized our individual freedom. A lot of this is done by the manipulation and control of information. In Orwell’s world it is the state. What is and is not true is regulated: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
In “1984,” a central government exerted control through mechanisms such as a restricted vocabulary of “newspeak,” which limits the range of acceptable thought, or even possible thought.
Well, unless you’re one of a growing number of conspiracy theorists, there’s no central force in control. That is the good news. The bad news is that there is no shortage of those seeking to control the past by creating their own versions of reality.
‘Newspeak,’ doublespeak and narratives
We do not have government control of information. Not even close. To the contrary, there are untold torrents of information flow of all sorts. These sort themselves and appeal to various attitude constituencies, each with its own version of newspeak and its first cousin, doublespeak, all enclosed in a neat wrapping that we now refer to as narratives.
Often fiction tells us more than fact because fiction is about insight. Insight can be trusted because it is no more than that. In what threatens to be today’s version of newspeak, facts are so bound up in narratives that they have no meaning beyond the narrative.
But all of it has one common underlying factor that political theorists, the Founders and Alexander Hamilton could not have anticipated or understood. Language in the past was about persuasion through subjects, verbs, advancing arguments and discrediting opponents with wicked prose. It was not for the faint of heart.
We dismiss the importance of truth at our peril
Did politicians lie? Of course they lied about their opponents and about what they might do. Donald Trump did not invent stating obviously false material. The difference now is that we have gone beyond something’s being factual to what historian and essayist Hannah Arendt saw decades ago as the greater danger: dismissing the importance of truth itself.
Her observations were profound. By 2016 the word of the year, according to the Oxford Dictionary, was “post-truth.” We humans certainly have ample psychological capacity to ignore evidence that causes dissonance with our prior patterns of belief.
24/7 news and social media
So everybody seeks out their own information, with the ongoing narrative grounded in two places: 24-hour news networks and social media sites.
The crazy thing is how what we might fear turns 180 degrees on itself. Orwell knew what a central monopoly on information in an authoritarian society could lead to. Stalin and Chairman Mao proved his point.
Let everyone come to see the damage caused by clinging to the comfort of a world unconstrained by evidence and fact. And let nobody get away with playing to the cheap seats to exploit this strange and dangerous new world.
William Lyons worked as a professor of political science and served for more than 16 years in a number of policy-related roles for Knoxville mayors.