Especially after the rise of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, there has been a dramatic shift away from truth in political discourse. One of the emblems of this lack of truthiness was displayed on the very first day of Mr Trump's Presidency, when then White House Press Secretary stated that the inauguration ceremony had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe". This obviously wasn't true at the time and was easily disproven.
For the next four years, America was bathed in statements that were not true and this state of continual lies marinated the general public's minds; to the point where we've seen conspiracy theories take root (and in the middle of a pandemic) and which resulted in a violent insurrection at the Capitol Building on January 6th as those untruths gave rise to more untruths. Mr Trump poisoned the waters before the 2020 election to try and prove that the election would be stolen and no amount of truth would act as a salve.
We have an election coming up in 2022 in Australia at some point. As Australia has a tendency to follow the United States when it comes to a bunch of ideas and political thought, it is no surprise that the current idiocy which is being displayed under the vague banner of 'Freedom' also lacks any commitment to the truth.
The 'Convoy To Canberra' at the weekend was the latest in a long line of protests against vaccine directives among other things but the main cut and thrust of speeches had nothing to do with reactions to policy in the face of a pandemic.
We heard things about vaccines sure, but there were also speeches about surveillance, about censorship, about supermarkets putting drugs in food, about the government passing laws taking away people's right to free speech (even in the face of these people collectively exercising that right) and a host of increasingly bizarre and eclectic views. Naturally as someone who had both a Facebook and a Twitter account, I am exposed to these kind of volatile views and opinions but taken as a group, the sheer scope of disconnected thought makes it impossible to determine any kind of sense of what these people actually stand for.
This is where we are in 2022. The spectators have become the spectacle and the media which is primarily concerned about spinning a profit, is quite prepared to place the silly and the sacred and the brutal and the banal alongside each other. Maybe in the olden days when people read newspapers or watched TV news, the various sections would be separated into: Local, National, World, Political, Finance, Sport, Weather, Fun Thing. In the age of social media, there is no separation of topic and no discernment by the general public of what is and isn't true, it would appear.
This is the epistemological problem of truth. Truth itself is the property/identity of a thing/statement being in accord and agreement with reality or fact. "Is this true?" is a question which can be verified through test and experiment. If we are talking about something which is non-corporeal, then truth may have to be corroborated with testimony and witness; provided those testimonies and witnesses are reliable.
Truth is supposed to ascribe fixed points of knowledge, to things and claims that either represent reality as it is, or overlays which include beliefs about how or why reality is and other propositions and declarations about what is and is not.
I am more familiar with John Locke's 1690 work 'Two Treatises of Government' but his 1689 work, the 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' touts itself as an inquiry "into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent". At 694 pages, that seems like a lot of effort to read through but the intent is obvious. It asks "how can we know that a thing is true?".
What we are witnessing in the 21st century, is not an undoing of the enlightenment but rather a deliberate stance of ignorance to any of its principles. The public square has become less about discerning what is and isn't true but saying literally anything in order to claim some kind of power.
A liar is someone who is aware of the truth and ironically has a commitment to creating a set of statements which are intended to establish some other position (usually for personal gain). Philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his two works 'On Bullshit' (2005) and 'On Truth' (2006), posited a decade and a half ago, that the world was moving towards a state in the Anglosphere at least, where although liars might say things which are disprovable, those people who use bullshit in discourse have no such commitment to establishing any kind of position.
One of the claims being put forward by Avi Yemini, Rebel News, Craig Kelly MP etc. was that there were a million people at the Convoy To Canberra at the weekend. Now, there are only 432,000 people who live in Canberra; so the claim that Canberra's population had swelled by 2.3x over the weekend was clearly idiotic. If this was true, then every single supermarket in Canberra should have been stripped bare and the entire city should have been in complete gridlock for several days. The equivalent would have been 12.3 million people arriving in Sydney for a protest.
Quite clearly the claim doesn't hold up but the people who chose to pass this idiotic claim on, not only never bothered to check the truthiness or reasonableness of the claim, when questioned they usually don't even admit that the claim is stupid.
In Australia, really the only media outlet that bothers to check claims made by public figures is the ABC's Fact Check Unit. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck/). The reason for this is that fact checking things is not only expensive in terms of time, there is no profit to be made because by the time that you have established that a thing is not true, the person who has made the claim and who had no commitment to the truth in the first place, will have already gone on to manufacture another untruth with no commitment to establishing any kind of position.
Not having any kind of commitment to truth is dangerous because it undermines people's trust in governments, institutions, the law, science, and the agents who work for the good of the general public. Not having any kind of commitment to truth makes lies pass through the gates into people's minds unchecked, makes violence and murder respectable after making those things possible actions for a cause, and allows power to pass into people who demonstrate that they do not care about the general public's welfare.
Moreover, I am really saddened and tired of seeing otherwise good and rational people, spout untruths and then get carried off by self chosen idiocy. Eventually these people don't want to listen to anything rational or sensible or truthful and instead turn to sources who please them by saying the things they want to hear. They end up joining the people no commitment to establishing any kind of position, turn their backs on truth as a concept and start chasing after mirages and other things which are illusions and nonsense.
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