The truth no longer matters, but why should you care?
Any idea, no matter how crazy, can be confirmed on the internet or simply repeated so often that it must be factual.
In 2020, thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts is easily justified and, apparently, just fine. In the end, reality and fantasy become weirdly, dangerously blurred, and commingled.
Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make our personal reality, believe whatever we want, and create the persona of whomever we wish.
It takes genuine effort to comb through the bullshit that floods the zone, and most people have busy lives, limited bandwidth, and personal challenges, so they don’t “comb.”
The global citizenry observes politicians immersing themselves in a cesspit of lies and deceit and often, zero accountability.
The world’s largest internet corporations have enabled the transition from a world of truth-seekers to a world of Bullshitters.
Google has super-charged the crazies by indexing any and all content on every server connected to the internet.
Twitter has emboldened and enabled out-of-control egos to broadcast their hateful and patently false mantras to an ever-growing audience.
Facebook has simplified the commercialization of right-wing fantasies and conspiracy theories so absurd as to beggar belief.
News Corp is the firehose for “shit that floods the zone”.
“And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit” — Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign
Reaction to all the bullshit is often to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Left, Team Right, and Team Conspiracies, and pretty much everyone knows which team they’re on. So you stick to the places and the sources that feed you the information you most want to hear, the content feeds that confirm your biases.
Which makes the lines between actual and fictional blur in-and-out of focus. Truth, in general, becomes flexible, personal, and highly subjective. And we seem to like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many wrongheaded fellow citizens use it.
Truth in America has been under attack this century. Right-wing media outlets are less tethered to conventional journalistic ethics and exist mostly to propagate the bullshit they produce.
That tends to indicate the American experiment with democracy has metastasized and is now out of control. Being American now means people can believe anything they damn well want to believe and justify that their actions are merely in support of their beliefs.
The world observes America morphing into a form of apocryphal Fantasyland where anarchy is fertilized by a daily firehose of Presidential tweets.
POTUS has convinced people that the truth is literally unknowable and so the obvious and sensible choice is to follow a strong, opinionated leader. A leader who repudiates social norms, and undermines the institutions that protect his community and the republic.
The only thing that matters is that the leader is “strong”.
Beliefs have become disconnected from science and proof-of-facts; any idea, no matter how crazy, can be confirmed on the internet or simply repeated so often that it must be factual.
The American leader doesn’t like experts, because they interfere with his right to believe and purvey that his fictions are facts. Trump’s daily portrayal of fiction-as-fact is like listening to a Tsunami.
The virtues embodied by America’s Founders and their secular descendants: steadiness, hard work, frugality, sobriety, and good old fashioned common sense are now marked as worthless and have been tossed overboard.
The pervasive digital technology of American corporations empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological, religious, and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “data” to support them.
Before the internet, crackpots were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the web — just like actual news.
For all intents and purposes, the fantasies look real, are real.
Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
It’s interesting to look at how the Roman empire unraveled and contrast that with what’s happening in America. Having staked a claim to own the 19th century, America powered on to emphatically own the 20th century.
Only a few months ago the 21st century was shaping as a titanic struggle between America and China, though many commentators now give the Americans less chance of dominating as it did last century.
The truth no longer matters, but why should you care?
Many people refuse to care and are happy and content to be card-carrying members of what they regard as the anti-establishment.
Some people are too tired to care. They’re literally exhausted from the struggles of daily life. They have neither the energy nor the funds nor the emotional bandwidth.
Other people sense they ought to care and ought to help fight a rear-guard action to bring transparency and accountability back to the fore.
In the end, everyone should care that truth is for sale, for truth is the foundation of all fair and just societies. Fairness and justice can only be served by unfailing adherence to objectivity and transparency.
When the leadership of a country dismisses truth and dispenses storylines that only support their brazen greed, their example eventually trickles down and through society.
A truth vacuum will be filled by fictional concepts that further the ambitions of unscrupulous, insatiable greed for money and power. The kind of greed that suppresses equality and diversity, and thrives on the unbridled exploitation of human and natural resources.
The lies that dribble from Trump’s mouth every day appeal to a good chunk of the country’s lizard brains; the people who love to hate and need guidance on where to direct their hate.
Exactly the flavor of human behavior that disrupted and eventually destroyed other great empires throughout history.
It’s a truth that most people are selfish and self-focused. And it’s that cynical view of human nature that was at the heart of the past 40 years of neoliberalism — privatization of public assets, inequality, rampant exploitation, and the erosion of the public sphere.
Now we’re in the worst crisis in 100 years and space has opened up for a different, more realistic view of human nature: that humankind has evolved to cooperate.
It’s from that conviction that all the rest can follow — a government based on truth, trust, a tax system rooted in solidarity, and the sustainable investments needed to secure our future.
And all this just in time to deal with the biggest test of this century, our pandemic in slow motion — climate change.
I started by stating, “the truth no longer matters, but why should you care?”
If you’re still with me then I hope that it’s clear that, in fact, the truth matters more than ever.
Effective global recovery from the pandemic can only be built on truth, and I mean truth at every level, in every layer of our society.
There’s no place for authoritarian clownery of the kind we’re seeing from the White House.
You and I need to set a high standard of truth and we need to demand that high standard from others, including elected representatives.
Lizard-brain haters will not have read this far. Know that their hatred inflames hatred in other lizard-brainers, so the fair-minded need to double-down in our efforts to instantiate that truth is a fundamental basis for a just society.
You owe it yourself, your kids, and your fellow citizens.
Nobel prize-winning author, William Faulkner, said it perfectly, “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.
If you, not just you in this room tonight but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as but individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.”
About the Author:
Greg Twemlow is a Sydney-based Social Enterprise Founder | Startup Mentor | CEO | Writer | Speaker | Founder of Consilio and Creativitee | Host of https://medium.com/consilio
