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How To Keep Your Head In A Post-Truth World.
In the internet era, there’s no belief that you can’t find support for. Do you believe that aliens are walking among us? This guy has been onto them for years. Are you convinced that the Earth is flat? These people are experts on the subject. Do you think that climate change is real or a hoax? Either way, the answer is a reassuring yes.
Some people have even gone as far as to call this the “post-truth” era. The foundation of objective reality that we’ve depended on for centuries to help us understand the world is crumbling in the face of ignorance, post-modernism, and our dwindling attention spans.
Where we might once have relied on the news to help us, they’re now part of the problem. News organisations were once able to rely on talented writers and the pursuit of truth to keep them in business, but now they’ve become increasingly focused on generating fear and highlighting our differences so that they can gain attention and sell our data to advertisers. The news presents an increasingly slanted view of the facts, which some have seized upon to suggest that there’s no such thing as facts at all.
The price of this uncertainty has been high. A reality TV host is the leader of the free world, our governments can’t decide whether we should…
