In an age of Brexit and Trump, is our post-truth world heading for a system reboot?
Andrew Sheng says that as what is true or false becomes harder to discern, the corresponding shift to the right in US society will make conflict more likely
The Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was reputed to have said that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will come to believe it.
Post-truth has always been part of politics
Allow me to be brutally honest: objective truths are theoretical fictions; truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. We have grown up in the age of science, in which there are, theoretically, immutable laws of nature, which we can test to verify. But human behaviour is always changing, so that observations about human nature do not conform to the laws of nature. There is always an element of uncertainty, which means that truths about human behaviour are always subjective.
We are living in a “post-truth” age because the newly elected leader of the US, the dominant global economy, is quite economical with his facts, opinions and policies, which are clearly not what we are used to under past US leaders.
From Brexit to the US election, 2016 saw a march towards universal distrust
Trump was elected because his electoral supporters were so fed up with conventional wisdom – that is, what is sane – that they were willing to try the insane. The establishment media and his opponent Hillary Clinton were so concerned with his inconsistencies with facts that they spent all their time attacking him. They failed to recognise that a large part of the electorate were already not listening – they wanted a change.