The Age of Lies

“One thing that’s been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts. They’re not really facts. It’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass half-full of water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”
– Scottie Nell Hughes on the Diane Rehm Show, December 2016

Here, the Conservative commentator Nell Hughes announced the era of post-truth politics. Trump was the first post-truth President and Brexit was the first post-truth geopolitical event. With slogans on hats and buses, these are events not just clouded in disinformation but saturated in lies and propaganda.

The dawning of the post-truth era is surprisingly precise. The Oxford Dictionary proclaimed ‘Post-Truth’ as its word of the year in 2016, defining it as the “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Narrative and story, ‘framing’ and ’emotional resonance’ are far more powerful tools than ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ it seems. Not that we didn’t know this already, but this ‘storytelling’ has been amplified and turbo-boosted by the new technologies that we, or others, wield.

Aaron Banks, the dodgy businessman who bankrolled the Leave campaign, analyzed the Brexit Referendum like this: “The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

It was indeed the Trump success and it was replicated in the Brexit campaign. Dominic Cummings had the idea of concocting a weekly cost of EU membership as £350 million – and suggesting that such a sum would be diverted to the NHS on our departure. It didn’t matter that none of these things were true, it was a good story, and so it was slapped on the side of a bus.

This was tabloid heaven.

In Trump-Brexit post-truth politics narrative is key and arguments should be reduced to very simple very understandable slogans. For Trump it was ‘Make America Great Again’ and baseball caps, for Brexit it was ‘Take Back Control’.

There is however, a strong argument for this post-truth politics to have originated two years earlier. ‘Better Together’ (2014) pre-dates ‘Take Back Control’ (2016) by two years and the distillation of political ideas was even more acute as laid out by Project Fear. ‘UK:OK’ was the micro slogan used by Rob Shorthouse and colleagues, a sort of desultory summation of constitutional affairs, belying the almost total lack of aspiration from the Unionist side.

However, while the Yes side produced gigantic tomes explaining everything about the future of an independent Scotland, Better Together turned up for photo shoots with a big chocolate coin, mocking the plans for a Scottish currency. While the Yes team immersed themselves in endless detail, the NO campaign, many who had experience as tabloid hacks could drown the media with negativity. As they knew well, bad news sells. Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon would later call this technique ‘Flooding the Zone’ (with shit).

The litany of Better Together lies is too vast for this post, though as your energy bills soar and winter sets in, here’s one from the archives …

A key element to this process of decay has been the distrust of ‘experts’, the attack on education and the distrust, even banning of books (Lost Words) which the Trump administration has been obsessed with. In this environment science and rational argument is discarded and wild conspiracism runs riot. This phenomenon affects all sides of politics. Who will forget the moments which united the critics of Nicola Sturgeon – when conspiracy theories ran wild that she was pretending to read or be interested in books?

The Technology

“We’re living in a post-objective-truth society where billionaire-controlled social media algorithms and media force curated narratives upon you, and reinforce the messages and propaganda most beneficial to them.”
– Melanie D’Arrigo

The idea that ‘social media’ and the algorithms are responsible for our present predicament is only part of the story. These technologies amplify a tendency that is already in the air, as the collapse in belief in systems and institutions erodes trust and faith that previously upheld an established order. People have lost faith in not just politicians but political systems as the social contract has been broken, as has trust in legacy media.  Why should you have faith in a political system that delivers abject social inequality or that makes Food Banks a permanent feature of our lives, and that makes ‘the cost of living’ a brutal unchanging reality?

The collapse of deference has a positive aspect to it, but only if people are organising around genuine alternatives and radical visions to get us out of this hellscape rather than obsessing about chemtrails and anti-vaxx fantasies.

This crisis of trust is compounded and exacerbated by the replacement of one party by another – from Tory to Labour – making no discernible difference. When politicians operate on the same wavelength, within the same ideological parameters, it is difficult to convince people that this is a system worth believing in.

As George Monbiot writes [Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage] this is a crisis of truth, a crisis of epistemology:

“An epistemic crisis is a crisis in the production and delivery of knowledge. It’s about what we know and how we know it, what we agree to be true and what we identify as false. We face, alongside a global threat to our life-support systems, a global threat to our knowledge-support systems.”

At a deeper level we live in age where the truth about our climate crisis isn’t being told. We are told that we can survive the climate catastrophe either by ameliorative changes to our lifestyle (paper straws, endless recycling), or by offsetting emissions from one source to another. Pass the parcel. We are told that we can survive this crisis without fundamental changes to how we live or to our economic system. This is the fundamental lie that sits at the heart of our society and our politics. Lies and self-deceit cloud perception. Once one lie gets to settle at the heart of our political discourse, contamination is inevitable.

Vested interests and dark money distort much of what we see and do.  Let’s just, amid the morass of lies, hold on to four simple facts, because facts do exist:

The BBC is not a left-wing broadcaster.

Donald Trump did incite rioters on January 6th.

Protesting against genocide is not a criminal act.

The BBC is not a pro-Palestine broadcaster.