This brings me to a second point: The truth is rarely self-evident in politics.
Actually, the truth often does not even exist. It is true that releasing green house gases into the atmosphere in large quantities will change the climate, but there is no truth for the question what we should do in response as that is a matter of [personal] preferences.
The proposed solutions to intractable problems such as climate change, like "stop driving cars" or "call off the industrial revolution" are often so ridiculous/unpalatable that there's a tendency to dismiss the problem itself.
> That many many people think the above are just opinions refutes the point that we're not in "post-truth"
That's what "post-truth" actually is, though. It doesn't mean objective fact doesn't exist, but it doesn't factor in to the basis of people's subjective reality. Which shouldn't be surprising given how many people believe their lives are controlled by an invisible man in the sky.
There are actually spectacularly gullible people even here on HN who disbelieve those and many other objective facts, and they reflexively throw infantile temper tantrums when somebody calls them out on it, or even mentions an objective fact in passing. Their entire vile personalities are invested in believing and spreading lies, and they feel personally attacked and lash out when anyone contradicts them with reality.
"vaccines are not bad for you" is better as
"Vaccines are not bad for us" since for every vaccine there is some (usually) very small chance that it will actually hurt someone but we as a whole (usually) will be better off.
This is a really dumb argument to make in today's day and age and lays out multiple false equivalencies. Due to the way social media and the web works today, it's now possible to have massive populations that live literally side-by-side with each other that live in entirely different realities from each other. Case in point - FEMA is having difficulty delivering aid in parts of the hurricane affected south because people are convinced they're going to take their houses or something. Do you actually think it has always been this bad?
Yes, propaganda and misinformation have always been there. Yes, truth is often subjective. However, things like "will drinking a bottle of soy sauce kill me" or "should I use horse deworming meds to treat a very serious viral disease" have pretty clear answers, and that's not what we see today.
The most egregious false equivalency is the bad faith argument of Trump saying Haitian migrants are eating pets (blatant lie which is stoking hate against an ethnic group) is somehow comparable to a slightly disingenuous misinterpretation of Trump's words that 'there were very fine people on both sides' (he was talking about the civil war and slaveowners, not neo-Nazis, not thay different in terms of impact of his words).
Even the way the "there were fine people on both sides" is presented here is in complete bad faith. He was addressing the charlotsville protests and counterprotests, one side of which was heavily represented by people who would consider themselves white nationalists/nazis. Trump himself would probably admit this to you. So, while he didn't literally say it, it was heavily implied in that statement, and you also have the benefit of all the context around that event and the next several years to make your own judgment about what he meant there. Just complete bad faith bozo stuff, glad this got flagged.
This has frustrated me a lot in recent times: people trying to claim that things have always been this way (the lying, the political polarization, the poor treatment of various marginalized groups, etc), and citing specific examples from the past...
...when the problem isn't that the whole idea of these is new, it's the scale. Without doing some kind of more comprehensive analysis on both the current and historical situations, you're not going to be able to prove it one way or another (so asking for proof that things are actually worse now is also just...totally impractical), but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
> [...] the poor treatment of various marginalized groups, etc.
> [...] but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
Treatment of marginalized groups is worse now than in the past?
Could maybe be argued if you intend some time-span bound (e.g: "worse now than it has been within my lifetime"), but even still I think this thinking is falling into a couple of traps already pointed out in the article, like treating the truth as "there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction" and therefore that anyone who does not see it must be oblivious.
Ten years ago, if your Uncle Dave posted a Facebook conspiracy theory that the government was controlling the weather so they could use FEMA to steal people's houses, most people would shake their heads and laugh, disregarding him as a nutjob.
Today, people are taking up arms and obstructing hurricane relief efforts because they're totally convinced it's true.
A lot of intellectual memes bother me. “Post-truth” gives me a tickle, “dunning kruger” perks up my ears, and “ZIRP” makes me want to throw a desk through a window.
People say these things because it helps them think less while, to some, giving them the veneer of thinking more.
Every time someone mentions Brave New World, 1984 or that thing Voltaire never actually said, I feel the same way. There should be a rule that you can't paraphrase an author unless you've actually read the work you're referring to.
Author correctly points out that this is not a new thing. I'm reminded of the quote broadly believed to have been from Karl Rove in the early 2000s, about propaganda and the Iraq war, dunking on people who live by "reality":
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.[1]
I'm sure this kind of mentality goes back even further. Someone can probably pull up some Nixon quote... That wasn't my era, so I don't know.
Once upon a time, even when political figures lied, few would suggest or assert it as such. The claim would be that they were mistaken or misinformed or that they were misquoted or that we simply did not hear what we thought we heard.
To some extent, this generous interpretation and public deference would/could be applied to things like:
However, the steady stream of outright fabrications/lies that now proliferate and saturate our political landscape has forced us to confront the reality that some (many?) elites just flat out lie and that many influencers know the lies and propagate them willingly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...)
10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the press to say a politician "lied", however the avalanche of false statements, doubled and tripled down on even in the face of objective reality now forces us to confront and I argue accept the assertion that we do in fact live in a "post-truth" world.
I don't want to or intend to signal out one party or world view (Trudeau was a Liberal icon), but here is JD Vance in his owns words explaining how the end justifies the means.
"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
The idea that the human race will never exactly agree on what is "true" is correct and obvious.
The opinion expressed here that nothing has changed in the world recently about how truth and politics are handled is false. With the collapse of reasonable arbiters of "truth", such as network TV anchors, who were imperfect themselves but nevertheless served as a check on the falsehoods that a political party could put out, parties have discovered that 100% bullshit 100% of the time is a workable approach to politics, and some of them are pursuing that. That was never true before.
> And even if you ignore most of human history and focus just on the period in liberal democracies immediately preceding 2016, the best explanation of the good old days is a bad memory—in this case, a strange amnesia about truly shocking epistemic failures.
> Consider, for example, the role of falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda in the invasion of Iraq or the role of false theories about economics and finance in the global financial crisis several years later.
We had a different name for this: manufactured consent.
Owing to the government's outsized control of the media, both through the "five filters" as well as a strict broadcast censorship regime constitutionally justified through scarce airwaves, the US government had incredible leeway to push their narrative. The Iraq war was itself an echo of the Vietnam War; except in Vietnam the US government was far more blatant about the lies and it was far harder for Americans to get an alternative perspective. At least with Iraq, America could point to a giant smoldering pile of rubble in the middle of lower Manhattan to justify arbitrary invasions of hostile Middle Eastern dictatorships, even if there was no evidence of Saddam actually trying to buy nukes. In contrast, Vietnam involved, among other things, the US government claiming a second destroyer attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened.
This kind of manufactured consent is arguably harder to pull off today, for a few reasons. You can easily read other countries' newsmedia now, something unthinkable pre-Internet. US and UK media was hellbent on selling you a second war in Iraq when every other country was reporting on how shoddy the evidence was[0].
On the other hand, people born into a heavily censored media environment have terrible news literacy and will believe anything once that censorship ends. This creates a new avenue for manufacturing consent, much like how republican and egalitarianism in 18th century Europe deposed hereditary nobility only to be co-opted by political extremists and conquesting dictators. If the powers that be cannot impose their own reality upon us, then they'll shatter reality, by proposing so many more alternative truths than the average person can ever hope to validate.
Speaking of the War on Terror, let's go back to the other war - the "good" one. Afghanistan is a country that is uniquely cursed with being in the way. Anyone with eyes of conquering Asia has to eventually contend with this completely worthless patch of sand in the middle of a desert. As a result, the average Afghan lives in a nightmare of having their government being completely upended every 10-20 years. America tried building a western democracy on it, but it collapsed, because nobody trusted it. Nobody trusts anything in Afghanistan, except their local warlord, who only trusts the Taliban, who only trusts God as depicted in the Quran and interpreted by extremely regressive religious scholars eager to undo the last century or so of modernity.
The "truth era", or the manufactured consent era, was one of mostly true information and people mostly willing to believe it. A heyday for lying politicians. What we did with the Internet, and in particular social media, is create a machine that can provide really high quality information, but more likely spits out random garbage. This lowers the average - we enter the "eating The Onion" era where people get pranked by obvious satire because they aren't discerning information consumers. But people don't want to start being picky about their media diets, that takes time and effort. They instead learn to distrust everything. Now we enter the Talibanization era, where people trust nothing, except their local politician, who only trusts their megadonors, who only trust God as depicted in the Bible and interpreted by extremely regressive outrage pundits eager to undo the last century...
> We had a different name for this: manufactured consent.
> Owing to the government's outsized control of the media,
> people born into a heavily censored media environment
With reference to the source material Manufacturing Consent (1988)
It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion"
Without Overt Coercion .. without outsized control, without heavy censorship, ..
relying instead on capitalism maximising profits with least effort, high return clickbait articles of no substance, wholesale quoting from handed out press releases, relying on lazy reporters, relying on lazy readers.
Relying on people imagining what a book or an article might be about rather than reading and thinking about it.
If we triangulate between Animal Farm and (the non-fast-forward bit of) 1984, we get a model in which there is no heavy censorship for the masses (in the former those who bleat 4 legs good 2 legs bad; in the latter, those who are simply ignored) but there is for any of the middle class necessary for administration (in the former, dogs and horses; in the latter, the Outer Party) who express other than total buy-in to the line* du jour.
(note how [Linebarger54] explicitly mentions en passant that very little in principle separates his subject, "psychological warfare", from either economic or peacetime political propaganda)
* taking great care to distinguish between administration of policy and policy of administration, of course!
Thinking about the new style I think a lot is driven by social media - you get more attention and forwarding by saying something outrageous and false than true and dull.
Trump has been kind of a master of exploiting that. Like he started in politics largely by claiming Obama wasn't born in the US which got loads of coverage in spite of being obviously false. In days gone by the press would have ignored him but in the run up to 2016 he got a huge following on twitter like that and then the mainstream press were forced to report on it to keep up so every day on the nyt or similar there would be a Trump says <some dumb thing> story which kind of got him elected president.
I think it may be fading a bit in effectiveness now as people wise up - we'll see how this election goes.
The argument that politicians lied in the past therefore nothing is different about politicians lying today would be a lot more persuasive if people making it didn't almost always pick from the same half dozen or two examples from the past.
Some current politicians can do that many new lies in a month. If past politicians were not matching that then things are not the same today.
Also the quality of the lie should be taken into account. A lie like Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction was (a) at least consistent with past experience (he had used poison gas on the Kurds) and (b) there was no real way for the public or press to check to see if it was true.
Compare to a modern lie like Haitian immigrants are eating pets. It's not consistent with past experience and it is something the press can actually go check. (That checking was done, it was thoroughly debunked, with even people from the claimant's own party in that area saying it was false...and yet the claimant keeps on making the claim).
That's a huge qualitative difference. It used to be to lie successfully you had lie about something where the truth would stay hidden at least for a while. When the truth did eventually come out if you wanted it to not damage you too much you had to be able to explain the lie away as faulty information or something like that.
30 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadActually, the truth often does not even exist. It is true that releasing green house gases into the atmosphere in large quantities will change the climate, but there is no truth for the question what we should do in response as that is a matter of [personal] preferences.
The following are all objective facts, that are disputed because they're inconvenient to some billionaires and the tribes of sheep that follow them:
That many many people think the above are just opinions refutes the point that we're not in "post-truth"That's what "post-truth" actually is, though. It doesn't mean objective fact doesn't exist, but it doesn't factor in to the basis of people's subjective reality. Which shouldn't be surprising given how many people believe their lives are controlled by an invisible man in the sky.
Yes, propaganda and misinformation have always been there. Yes, truth is often subjective. However, things like "will drinking a bottle of soy sauce kill me" or "should I use horse deworming meds to treat a very serious viral disease" have pretty clear answers, and that's not what we see today.
...when the problem isn't that the whole idea of these is new, it's the scale. Without doing some kind of more comprehensive analysis on both the current and historical situations, you're not going to be able to prove it one way or another (so asking for proof that things are actually worse now is also just...totally impractical), but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
> [...] but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
Treatment of marginalized groups is worse now than in the past?
Could maybe be argued if you intend some time-span bound (e.g: "worse now than it has been within my lifetime"), but even still I think this thinking is falling into a couple of traps already pointed out in the article, like treating the truth as "there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction" and therefore that anyone who does not see it must be oblivious.
Today, people are taking up arms and obstructing hurricane relief efforts because they're totally convinced it's true.
People say these things because it helps them think less while, to some, giving them the veneer of thinking more.
I'm not sure how many neolib "thinkers" would have survived this rule.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
To some extent, this generous interpretation and public deference would/could be applied to things like:
* Trump's "fine people" comment
* Trudeau's "Fuddle Duddle" remark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddle_duddle)
or even
* Rich Lowry and Fox's defense of his "combining" the words "migrants" and "immigrants" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Lowry)
However, the steady stream of outright fabrications/lies that now proliferate and saturate our political landscape has forced us to confront the reality that some (many?) elites just flat out lie and that many influencers know the lies and propagate them willingly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...)
10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the press to say a politician "lied", however the avalanche of false statements, doubled and tripled down on even in the face of objective reality now forces us to confront and I argue accept the assertion that we do in fact live in a "post-truth" world.
I don't want to or intend to signal out one party or world view (Trudeau was a Liberal icon), but here is JD Vance in his owns words explaining how the end justifies the means.
"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-cla...
So lies by politicians are now so normalized that some, when confronted with the truth, don't even bother to cover them.
The opinion expressed here that nothing has changed in the world recently about how truth and politics are handled is false. With the collapse of reasonable arbiters of "truth", such as network TV anchors, who were imperfect themselves but nevertheless served as a check on the falsehoods that a political party could put out, parties have discovered that 100% bullshit 100% of the time is a workable approach to politics, and some of them are pursuing that. That was never true before.
> Consider, for example, the role of falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda in the invasion of Iraq or the role of false theories about economics and finance in the global financial crisis several years later.
We had a different name for this: manufactured consent.
Owing to the government's outsized control of the media, both through the "five filters" as well as a strict broadcast censorship regime constitutionally justified through scarce airwaves, the US government had incredible leeway to push their narrative. The Iraq war was itself an echo of the Vietnam War; except in Vietnam the US government was far more blatant about the lies and it was far harder for Americans to get an alternative perspective. At least with Iraq, America could point to a giant smoldering pile of rubble in the middle of lower Manhattan to justify arbitrary invasions of hostile Middle Eastern dictatorships, even if there was no evidence of Saddam actually trying to buy nukes. In contrast, Vietnam involved, among other things, the US government claiming a second destroyer attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened.
This kind of manufactured consent is arguably harder to pull off today, for a few reasons. You can easily read other countries' newsmedia now, something unthinkable pre-Internet. US and UK media was hellbent on selling you a second war in Iraq when every other country was reporting on how shoddy the evidence was[0].
On the other hand, people born into a heavily censored media environment have terrible news literacy and will believe anything once that censorship ends. This creates a new avenue for manufacturing consent, much like how republican and egalitarianism in 18th century Europe deposed hereditary nobility only to be co-opted by political extremists and conquesting dictators. If the powers that be cannot impose their own reality upon us, then they'll shatter reality, by proposing so many more alternative truths than the average person can ever hope to validate.
Speaking of the War on Terror, let's go back to the other war - the "good" one. Afghanistan is a country that is uniquely cursed with being in the way. Anyone with eyes of conquering Asia has to eventually contend with this completely worthless patch of sand in the middle of a desert. As a result, the average Afghan lives in a nightmare of having their government being completely upended every 10-20 years. America tried building a western democracy on it, but it collapsed, because nobody trusted it. Nobody trusts anything in Afghanistan, except their local warlord, who only trusts the Taliban, who only trusts God as depicted in the Quran and interpreted by extremely regressive religious scholars eager to undo the last century or so of modernity.
The "truth era", or the manufactured consent era, was one of mostly true information and people mostly willing to believe it. A heyday for lying politicians. What we did with the Internet, and in particular social media, is create a machine that can provide really high quality information, but more likely spits out random garbage. This lowers the average - we enter the "eating The Onion" era where people get pranked by obvious satire because they aren't discerning information consumers. But people don't want to start being picky about their media diets, that takes time and effort. They instead learn to distrust everything. Now we enter the Talibanization era, where people trust nothing, except their local politician, who only trusts their megadonors, who only trust God as depicted in the Bible and interpreted by extremely regressive outrage pundits eager to undo the last century...
> Owing to the government's outsized control of the media,
> people born into a heavily censored media environment
With reference to the source material Manufacturing Consent (1988)
Without Overt Coercion .. without outsized control, without heavy censorship, ..relying instead on capitalism maximising profits with least effort, high return clickbait articles of no substance, wholesale quoting from handed out press releases, relying on lazy reporters, relying on lazy readers.
Relying on people imagining what a book or an article might be about rather than reading and thinking about it.
(note how [Linebarger54] explicitly mentions en passant that very little in principle separates his subject, "psychological warfare", from either economic or peacetime political propaganda)
* taking great care to distinguish between administration of policy and policy of administration, of course!
While people have lied forever, post-truth implies a particular style of lying.
Trump has been kind of a master of exploiting that. Like he started in politics largely by claiming Obama wasn't born in the US which got loads of coverage in spite of being obviously false. In days gone by the press would have ignored him but in the run up to 2016 he got a huge following on twitter like that and then the mainstream press were forced to report on it to keep up so every day on the nyt or similar there would be a Trump says <some dumb thing> story which kind of got him elected president.
I think it may be fading a bit in effectiveness now as people wise up - we'll see how this election goes.
Some current politicians can do that many new lies in a month. If past politicians were not matching that then things are not the same today.
Also the quality of the lie should be taken into account. A lie like Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction was (a) at least consistent with past experience (he had used poison gas on the Kurds) and (b) there was no real way for the public or press to check to see if it was true.
Compare to a modern lie like Haitian immigrants are eating pets. It's not consistent with past experience and it is something the press can actually go check. (That checking was done, it was thoroughly debunked, with even people from the claimant's own party in that area saying it was false...and yet the claimant keeps on making the claim).
That's a huge qualitative difference. It used to be to lie successfully you had lie about something where the truth would stay hidden at least for a while. When the truth did eventually come out if you wanted it to not damage you too much you had to be able to explain the lie away as faulty information or something like that.
Nowadays you can just move onto a new lie.