In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” was post-truth, suggesting that truth is dead, and objective facts no longer have any meaning. Really? Have we become so poisoned with relativism that standards no longer exist and the individual is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, fact and fiction, truth or lies and, by way of conclusion, “anything goes?”
“What is truth?” is one of the central questions of philosophy. Is Corey Booker correct to suggest that we must all live “our truth”? Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Corey Booker can debate the answer. Here’s one truth, however, that should but probably won’t be universally accepted. It is that there is a difference between truth and belief.
What is or should be of great concern is how falsehood, what a business school course once called “creative misrepresentation” and fiction are used to persuade or judge everyday matters. And of paramount concern is how lies have been weaponized so as to cause belief to be to pushed and accepted as truth. By way of example, that the Benghazi disaster was the result of an anti-muslim video was proclaimed so loudly and assertively, it brainwashed many.
It’s also true that not everything is black or white. Grey is the predominant color in debate. But has the questioning of norms and rules gone so far overboard that it attacks the very idea of having any rules at all as Victor Davis Hanson suggested in his 2014 essay “The Poison of Postmodern Lying“? As he so starkly points out, “Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are irrelevant.”
So it seems nowadays that truth is in the hands of he or she who has the bigger megaphone, or who can more cleverly devise a phrase or seven second soundbite that tugs at a heartstring or “sounds right.”
The antidote?
Critical Thinking…something that is sorely lacking in our population today. Or, how about, at least, healthy skepticism?
Not all news is fake news, but a lot of it consists of selective truth, or facts taken out of context. Not all advertising is nonsense, though healthy skepticism should cause us to consider whether ground-up peach pits will cure cancer, or whether an actress’s proclamation that vaccinations cause autism should be accepted as truth.
If you hear a talking head say, “Let me be clear,” or “Make no mistake”, or “The truth of the matter is”, or, my favorite…”It goes without saying,” immediately turn on your skeptic’s filter.
Separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, involves work. It is the work of seeking out, validating and judging evidence. In an era of information overload, (I like the analogy of trying to take a drink from a firehose), sounding plausible or looking, in the case of websites or television, as if it’s plausible does not mean it’s true. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything your read.” Now we have to add “hear” and “see” to the list. Today you can’t even believe your own eyes thanks to the wonders of PhotoShop.
Besides applying the principle of critical thinking we can resolve to tell the truth ourselves, teach our children and grandchildren the difference between truth and a lie (remember George Washington and the cherry tree?) and remind ourselves not to be swayed by the herd, by popular opinion, by peer pressure and by what tugs at the heart while bypassing our brains.
The truth matters.
