The term “post-truth” is intended to designate a mark of the present, when beliefs would weigh more in the formation of public opinion than evidence or rational arguments. This would distinguish our time from the previous ones. But when was it different?
What distinguishes our time is not what the definition of post-truth indicates. Beliefs, rational arguments, and evidence are different things, but that’s not the main problem with post-truth. It is the deliberate production and alarming proliferation of arguments of the most fanciful and reactionary kind, which present themselves as if they were rational and supported by evidence. Post-truth, then, is less about the veracity of information and more about the credibility of fanciful and reactionary information sources.
These sources multiply, with surprising reach and capillarity, on digital social networks, owned by large corporations, mostly North American, which have become the richest in the world thanks to the popularization of services provided with an almost universal connection at affordable prices. In exchange for the service, we give away our behavioral data, which is transformed into metadata (data about the data) in the billion-dollar predictive behavior market. The transfer of data and its transformation into metadata unfolds, at the other end, into an efficient induction to the consumption of things, ways of life and worldviews, which become new data and so on. Emotional appeal generates more engagement and profit than commitment to the truth. And that’s where cheap gets expensive.
Fake news and post-truth
Why do we believe in anyone? Why do we doubt? What are “evidence” and “rational arguments”? Outside the specialized debate of scientists and philosophers, rational arguments are simply those apparently backed by evidence, at first sight coherent and superior to opposing arguments. You don’t have a lot of time, stimulation or preparation to spend on long debates and checks. In fact, at least in Brazil, most people don’t even have the resources for this, as the cheapest data packages only give access to certain networks, such as Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, which for many people is the internet itself.
Now, the universe of fake news is made up of a wide range of apparently rational arguments, based on apparently real evidence. Outside of religions, no one credits information that seems fanciful and absurd. This perception will vary according to the reality reference frame of each social group. These cadres are formed in families, churches, schools, media and digital networks. The latter increasingly filter the meanings of the others, producing new pictures. As these multiply, some common references fade away.
Post-truth, therefore, does not result from a devaluation of truth, evidence and rational arguments, as is often said, but from the intensification of the credibility crisis of the main modern cognitive authorities, the so-called serious Press, Science and the State of Right, for broad sectors of the population. This crisis stems from the public recognition of the distancing of these institutions in relation to their interests and their subordination to corporate interests. It also results from the consequences felt, but not necessarily understood, of the global economic crisis, concomitant with the apparent closure of the modern perspective of a better life, whether in the socialist or liberal framework.
This situation is bewildering, favoring the emergence of myriads of pseudo cognitive authorities, located on the far right of the political spectrum, which multiply like a plague on digital networks and in sectors of the press, where the banner of freedom of expression is hypostasized in an ultra individualist and neotribal, detached from the Enlightenment commitment to the reason that originally founded it.
The confused perception of the causes of the economic crisis, added to these losses of references and horizons, are fertile ground for the proliferation of the most bizarre and opportunistic analyzes and solutions, which at an unprecedented speed and scale, exhume, rehash and innovate in the mixtures of putrefied ingredients of the past: earthworks, religious intolerance, racism, misogyny, anti-vaccination movements, anti-intellectualism, Nazism.
In the post-modern ambience of post-truth, distrust of authorities, a healthy achievement of modernity, becomes a mixture of salvationist skepticism and dogmatism. In Brazil, a political and cultural ambience of maddening unrealism was created in digital networks.
the role of the media
We cannot forget the role of the big corporate media in bringing us to the current state. Because if not for the relentless political persecution she waged against the Workers’ Party, the fraudulent impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the illegal imprisonment of Lula would hardly have occurred, events that paved the way for the reckless race towards a sanitary, cultural, psychological hell , ecological and economic in which they put us, which has been transforming the “country of the future” into a turbocharged cart in the opposite direction of history. A rebuttal by scientists to the new statement made by Brazil’s current president against vaccines was recently published in the Brazilian press. The article’s subtitle reads: “Experts explain what the ‘IgG in 991’ is and why the president’s argument has no scientific basis.”
How many readers of this text know what “IgG in 991” means without consulting Google? Would Google give the best answers? In what sequence?
The question is who to give credit to, the president, Google or the experts disqualified by the president, who turn to other experts.
In fact, a certain skepticism towards specialists in general is even healthy, especially those listed by the big corporate media, see the list of economists on duty in Brazilian TV news, always on the verge of “technically” legitimizing the dismantling of public service and economic policies anti-popular. The problem is when this healthy distrust turns into dogmatic skepticism and uncritical adherence to lying sources of information. Even worse is when these sources, thanks to digital platforms and their networks (which also make money from it), multiply user bubbles, whose confirmation bias – psychological tendency to only believe what confirms our beliefs and expectations and to refuse everything more – favors collective self-deception.
The most serious thing, however, is when a substantial part of the information circulating in these groups, forging their myths, is surreptitiously financed by tax evaders and destroyers of the environment. In the Brazilian case, there is strong evidence that these elements are innately associated with corrupt, reactionary, authoritarian and unprepared politicians as managers. Some of them are ideologically guided by a notorious charlatan and cross the edges of the law in collusion with militias. All this with the approval of big business and sectors of the supposedly enlightened middle class. The icing on the cake is the scandalous support by the medical community for antiscience, a strange support that deserves a study of its own. None of this is post-truth, it’s the plain truth.
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