Truth is dead and buried. It’s was killed by four blows to the head.
The first and worst (also the best) is the internet which is the structural driver. Access to unlimited information has substituted authority, consensus and evidence with identity, fragmentation and narrative.
The second and perhaps outright worst is the rise of post-modernity, in particular post-structuralism. Its collapsing of all meaning flattens knowledge into a featureless landscape of indifferent and incurious humanity.
The third blow was Donald Trump who used the authority of the Office of POTUS to shift civil society normatives from reason and argument to fakeness and poop-throwing. This crowning achievement is embedded today with the launch of his own social media network ironically called “Truth”. In doing so Trump legitimised whatever falsehood anybody wants to believe in.
The final blow was COVID 19. China’s plague for all our houses, which has sent much of the world completely barmy and countless millions down internet rabbit holes.
The landscape for truth is in ruins:
- Economies everywhere are utterly dependent upon the printing of money and government debt. There are no plans for the liberal reforms that brought the developed world to its riches.
- Politics everywhere, especially in Australia, is now completely phony. The Coalition pretends to care about: women while raping; carbon while polluting; markets while rent-seeking; China while building subs in 30 years, health while botching vaccines; immigration while pumping it. Labor and the Greens are, if anything, even more fake, fully enforcing freewheeling global capital and national human plus environmental degradation.
- Social normatives are in flux with anything and everything possible from neo-Nazism to amorphous sexuality. Polarisation is ripping.
- Geopolitics is a sea of lies with the hottest contests of all in stoking all of the above to a frenzy within democratic borders.
- The values that gave rise to markets are in ashes. Bubbles are routine. Unmoney is repackaged as gold and becomes the hottest asset class. Common people invest their savings into the very fascistic regimes that are destroying their liberal system.
We are now living in the era of Goebbel’s Big Lie, oft-repeated, never in doubt, cheerled from all directions.
The last time that global cognition went through this phenomenon was the pre-WWII years when Bolsheviks, Fascists and Liberals slugged it out in Europe. At first with militias and brown shirts and then with the mighty guns of the state. 75m people had to die to re-establish the truth on that occasion.
The only point of hope we have that this will not recur is that the driving force of so much of it – the internet – is the greatest tool for human inaction ever invented.
If we’re lucky, even WWIII will be fake.