Post-truth politics is taking over, except in the places where it isn’t
George Orwell famously wrote that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Except, of course, he never wrote anything of the sort. But that hasn’t stopped the quote from being re-posted millions of times on the internet by people who want enough for it to be genuine that they don’t bother checking.
It seems everyone at the moment is talking about post-truth politics. Some politicians, we are told, are now more than ever using “truthiness” to win support. That is, they will readily say things that are demonstrably untrue, but which massage and flatter the baser instincts of their audiences. Mostly this goes unchallenged. Facts which contradict the gut convictions or personal experiences of true believers are dismissed as elite propaganda.
And there is an increasingly popular belief, too, that social media is accelerating fragmented voters’ inability to agree on a common set of facts about their societies. Dodgy statistics and spurious memes are retweeted uncritically. Reasoned debate, we are told, has been replaced by a constant howl of outrage. And algorithmic timelines supposedly allow each of us to exist in our own alternate reality by only allowing in information which reinforces our existing opinions.
The growing body of academic evidence for the existence of the filter bubble phenomenon is mixed. But the idea has taken hold; the Wall Street Journal, for example, has introduced a comparison tool which allows people to see in real time how different political factions in the United States exist in separate media universes, each incomprehensible to the other. This is undoubtedly a huge problem for public communication, whether by governments or by businesses.
But while post-truth politics is a vogueish term, is it really anything new? The print press, too, is partisan. People have always had an astonishing capacity to lap up information which confirms their worldview and ignore that which challenges it. And likewise, there have always been politicians prepared to tell voters what they want to hear if it will advance their own ends.
There may be a counterpoint. British voters, when recently polled, said overwhelmingly (85%) that public policy should be based on objective evidence and expert consultation. This seems to contradict current assumptions that a jaded and fragmented public has “had enough of experts”. But then again, other polls consistently show widespread support for certain policies which are discredited but nonetheless appeal to us on a more basic level.
It’s this gap between what the public says it wants, and what it actually votes for, that has been a standard occupational hazard for governments for decades. The advent of the internet has simply changed the way the debate is conducted. As Winston Churchill famously said during world war two, a lie can travel half way around the world before the truth has got its shoes on. Except, of course, that he didn’t.
Written by Nick Reading, Senior Account Manager (@NickReading1)
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