Post-Truth
Characteristics
Zachary Stein:
"The new post-truth culture is most obviously dangerous when it comes to orientating collective action towards the realities of the physical world. It is simply dangerous to not have a clear sense of the effects of common industrial toxins and food additives, the scope of climate change, or the amount of radiation leaking from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor. It is more comfortable to see post-truth culture as a problem contained to things like tabloids and contentious presidential politics. According to this view we can simply set up a Google “fact checker” without ever settling the tricky problem of what constitutes a fact or truth (Wilber, 2017). The issue is much deeper then celebrity gossip and lurid political mudslinging.
The post-truth culture is predicated on the following accelerating trends in the new
informational ecosystem:
1. the inability to distinguish non-commercially motivated from commercially motivated information;
2. the related inability to distinguish honest information from intentional misinformation that is spread for strategic advantage;
3. decreased message length, increased message frequency, and inability to track all message sources (i.e., information overload);
4. the absence of shared overarching meta-narrative that could potentially reconcile conflicting information and perspectives;
5. escalating emotional intensity of information (due to factors 1-4);
6. weaponization of language, (i.e., lies, slander, censorship, politicization, due to factor 4).
Micah White (2016), who was one of the key architects of Occupy Wall Street, discusses these
trends from the perspective of the interface between politics and social media, where now the
representation of the political takes precedence over actual politics. David Healy (1996; 2002) and
Robert Whitaker (2015) discuss the same phenomenon in the fields of medicine and psychiatry,
where the profit motive is systematically distorting research and public information campaigns.
The same dynamics have caused a breakdown in discourse surrounding the reform of public
schools in the United States, as the politicization of testing and the occurrence of widespread
cheating has created disinformation, intense animosity, and a “chamber of echoes” (Ravitch, 2013;
Schneider, 2014)."
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)