Denial, distortion, delusion: The Era of Post-Truth
What was considered a “valid truth” yesterday, can be wrong today; what was written off as “conspiracy” yesterday, can be a fact today.
Economist and media analyst Edward S. Herman, who co-authored the ground-breaking book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media with Noam Chomsky, once said about the postmodern quest of finding the truth: “Convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic.” A mythology, when skillfully constructed, gradually transforms into a narrative, an absolute truth, without any regard for objective reality – especially when helped by media propaganda and political incentives. Discrepancies with reality are denied out of existence, they are distorted and shaped at will, or just not explained at all. Truth therefore becomes malleable; it can be adjusted according to our own beliefs and becomes a perceived truth.
But if anyone can claim the truth for themselves, the claim to truth is nullified. In our postmodern era of fake news and alternative facts, of conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns, finding the truth has become a Herculean task. Not even Foucault and the Poststructuralists could have dreamt of the kind of pluralism of truth we are confronted with today. What was considered a “valid truth” yesterday, can be wrong today; what was written off as “conspiracy” yesterday, can be a fact today.
The more you look around in today’s media landscape, the more you become aware of the cognitive dissonance you need to be capable of in order to grasp this Orwellian doublethink. Contradictions have become part and parcel of our everyday lives; truth has become an illusion. The following three examples of recent politics in Germany and the US demonstrate this clearly.
Ms. Baerbock and her voters
On August 31, 2022, at the 26th Forum 2000 Conference in Prague, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, participated in a Ukraine panel where she made a statement that caused quite some criticism. The Minister of Foreign Affairs said: “If I give the promise to people in Ukraine: ‘We stand with you as long as you need us’, then I want to deliver, no matter what my German voters think, but I want to deliver to the people of Ukraine.” A video cut showing her saying these words immediately took off on Twitter, the hashtags #Baerbock, #Hochverrat (meaning “high treason”) und #BaerbockRuecktritt (meaning “Baerbock resignation”) were trending on Twitter over the next few days. The public outrage was enormous. But then, two days later, ARD fact checkers1 reported that the hashtags and videos were probably part of a “pro-Russian campaign” and had been “ripped out of context”: “If you watch Baerbock’s appearance in its entirety, it becomes clear that her statement wasn’t meant that way”, said the fact checkers.
Wait a second.
“Wasn’t meant that way?” You might argue about that. In the official, uncut video of the panel, which was uploaded by the official event organizers on their YouTube channel, you can watch Ms. Baerbock’s statements at full length. The context is unequivocally clear and not even BR fact checkers2, who claimed that the “Baerbock quote was falsified and instrumentalized” in a pathetic attempt to bail out the Foreign Minister, can hide the fact that she said what she said. It barely surprises anyone anymore that Public Service Broadcasters, acting in the name of the government, jump to Ms. Baerbock’s defense instead of criticizing her dubious statements (I repeat: “no matter what my German voters think”). However, the denial of a factual reality which everybody can hear and see in the video recording is indeed a new level of doublethink, even for Public Service Broadcasters. Note: The Minister might have said something, but she didn’t mean it.
How do you define a woman?
On March 22, 2022, having been nominated to the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (which she now holds), judge Ketanji Brown Jackson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee where she was asked an interesting question by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Senator Blackburn asked for a definition of the word “woman”. Judge Jackson replied that she wasn’t a “biologist” and was therefore unable to answer the question.
On July 12, 2022, during another Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion, US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) had a similar row with Berkeley Law professor Khiara M. Bridges because of the same problematic definition. Senator Hawley asked Professor Bridges whether by the term “people with a capacity for pregnancy”, which she had frequently used in the hearing, she was referring to women. Bridges responded: “Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non binary people who are capable of pregnancy.” During the bizarre conversation, Bridges eventually lost her temper when Hawley claimed that men couldn’t get pregnant.
The day after, on July 13, 2022, a similar scene unfolded at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing surrounding the Supreme Court decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Representative Andrew Clyde (R-GA) asked Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, to provide a definition for the word “woman”. Unable to define a woman, she was only able to respond that she “identified” as one herself.
Let’s recap: a female Supreme Court Justice, a female Law professor and the female president of an NGO advocating for women’s rights are not able to define a woman. Whereas Brown at least mentions the aspect of biology, thereby suggesting that the definition of a woman is indeed intertwined with a biological reality, Bridges and Goss immediately haul out the big guns of gender ideology which claims that everybody who feels like a woman can be a woman.
The simultaneous claims of gender ideology do indeed pose a challenge to logical thinking and common sense: First of all, sex is supposedly “assigned” randomly at birth by a doctor, without taking into account the baby’s gender identity. The biological reality of sexual dimorphism (female/male) doesn't exist. However, you can undergo “gender affirming surgery” and transition to a become a woman or man. But you cannot define a woman or a man because what matters is how you feel. Consequently, everybody can be a woman. The rule is: Transwomen are women, but transwomen aren't transwomen because claiming that is transphobic. The entanglement of contradictions and the denial of objective reality are absolutely remarkable. This is doublethink in its purest form. Note: What matters is how you feel, not what you are.
Of toolboxes and snow tires
On September 8, 2022, the German Bundestag passed a new Infection Protection Act which not only allows for an extensive mask mandate (in public transport, schools and other indoor spaces, however not on planes for some inexplicable reason), but also for school closures and a ban on demonstrations. To justify these massive restrictions on fundamental rights, the government said this “legal toolbox” or “legal snow tires” are supposed to facilitate implementing measures as Germany is heading into the next Covid winter. When looking at other European countries, however, these legal measures are nowhere to be found: Even the state-sponsored Bayerische Rundfunk reported that from Spain to Switzerland to Sweden the pandemic has become a “secondary matter” and that there are nearly no Covid restrictions anymore, much less restrictions on fundamental rights.
A critical thinker might start to wonder: Does that mean that the virus behaves differently in different countries? Does the virus affect the Germans differently than, say, the French? But the difficulty of ascertaining the truth when it comes to Covid is no news. No other topic of the last two and a half years so perfectly exemplified Orwellian doublethink. An avalanche of utterly contradictory statements, of rules that could change in the blink of an eye, and of measures that denied any common sense led us down into a spiral of confusion that eventually undermined any sense of logic or reality.
Millions and millions of people were supposed to die from Covid, which wasn't the case. The vaccine was supposed to protect you from infection, but it doesn't. The vaccine was supposed to protect you from a severe course of the disease, but it doesn't. The vaccine was promised to be absolutely safe, but it isn't. A certain vaccination rate was supposed to create herd immunity, but that wasn't the case. The mask was supposed to protect you from infection, but it doesn't. Ivermectin wasn’t supposed to help against Covid, but suddenly it does. It was promised that a vaccine mandate would never happen in Germany, but then you needed to be vaccinated for certain jobs. People would not be coerced into getting booster shots, but now they are. The new Omicron booster is recommended by the CDC, the German RKI et al., but was only tested on eight mice… this list could be endlessly continued.
If the Covid crisis has made one thing absolutely clear, it’s the realization that the quest for truth has become virtually impossible. In the jungle of contradictions, one is bound to stumble against their own cognitive limits as nobody knows what to believe and what not to believe anymore. The mental fatigue of confusion finally makes the majority of people – either out of complacency and conformity or out of desperation and surrender – decide to adhere to the kind of the truth they’re most comfortable with. And then, people stop questioning narratives. Note: The more confusion and information, the easier it is to control the “truth”.
By the way: Less than half an hour after the German Bundestag passed the new Infection Protection Act, the ZDF3 published an article entitled: “Germany: Almost Everyone Has Covid Antibodies”. In the study quoted by the article, it says that “in most age groups a majority of people probably have a moderate or high degree of protection (against the currently dominating SARS-CoV-2 variant) against a severe course of a COVID-19 disease.”
Quod erat demonstrandum.
“Truth always lags last”
Denial, distortion, delusion: Not only has it become incredibly difficult to distinguish truth from lie in the era of post-truth, but there is also a pluralism of truths that shakes the very foundations of our reality. Principles that were considered irrefutable truths until very recently – for instance, the definition of a woman as an “adult human female” or the definition of vaccination as the “injection of a killed or weakened infectious organism in order to prevent a disease” – are at stake. “The man who can discover, shape, and distribute information has an enormous amount of power. The currency in our postmodern knowledge-regime is language, fact, image, and emotion”, says author Christopher Rufo. “Learning how to wield these is the whole game.”
But how do we win this game? We need to wake up people from their cognitive lethargy to return to individual responsibility. Only a responsible, skeptical and critical mind can survive in the post-truth era and can live in freedom. The quest for truth might not be an easy endeavor, but it is a necessary one, now more than ever. And so, to end on a hopeful note, I would like to quote the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián4 from The Art of Worldly Wisdom, who wrote as early as the 17th century: “Lies always come first, dragging fools along by their irreparable vulgarity. Truth always lags last, limping along on the arm of time.”5
About the author: Born 1987, with roots in Germany and the Philippines, living in Spain. Constantly curious and eager to learn new things. Freedom > safety. Your own opinion > groupthink. Coffee > tea. Movie recommendation: “What Is a Woman?” by Matt Walsh
Die deutsche Version des Artikels findet sich hier:
The ARD is part of and therefore financed by German Public Service Broadcasting.
The BR is also part of German Public Service Broadcasting.
The ZDF is also part of German Public Service Broadcasting.
I was inspired to use this quote thanks to Milosz Matuschek’s article “Wanted: Islands of Wisdom in a Sea of Stupidity”
“Las mentiras siempre vienen primero, arrastrando a los estupidos. La verdad siempre viene hasta el final, cojeando tomada del brazo del tiempo.”