The Post-Truth Era
By Ralph Keyes At one time we had truth and lies. Now we have truth, lies, and statements that may not be true but we consider too benign to call false. Euphemisms abound. We’re “economical with the truth,” “sweeten it,”or tell “the truth improved.” The term deceive gives way to spin. At worst we admit to “misspeaking,” or “exercising poor judgment.” Nor do we want to accuse others of lying. We say they’re in denial. “That’s okay,” we say. “He meant well.” “What is truth, anyway?”
The danger is that less and less distinction is made between truth and lies, to the point where they have a rough equivalence. This is post-truth. In the post-truth era, borders blur between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction. Deceiving others becomes a challenge, a game, a habit. Research suggests that the average American lies on a daily basis, often multiple times. These fibs run the gamut from “I like sushi,”to “I love you.”
“Lying has become a cultural trait in America,”one pollster concluded. “Americans lie about everything – and usually for no good reason.”
What motivates the casual dishonesty that’s become pandemic? Why do so many, even those with no apparent need to do so, feel a need to puff up their personal history? This question arises every time prominent figures are unmasked as fabulists: businesspeople, politicians, journalists, scholars, judges, military officers, police chiefs, beauty queens, New Mexico’s governor, the head of the United States Olympic Committee, the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Branches are grafted onto their family trees. Unearned degrees show up on their resumes. Purchased medals appear in their display cases. Thousands of non-veterans say they fought in Vietnam. Scores more pass themselves off as Ground Zero rescue workers.
We can only understand the motives of such dissemblers by examining the sea in which they swim. Trends ranging from Joseph Campbellian mythmaking to therapeutic non-judgment encourage deception. There is much incentive and little penalty for improving the “narrative”of one’s life. The increasing influence of therapists, entertainers, politicians, and lawyers, with their flexible code of ethics, contribute to the post-truth era. So do postmodern relativism, Boomer narcissism, the decline of community, and rise of the Internet.
As the volume of strangers and acquaintances in our lives rises, so do opportunities to improve on the truth. The result is a widespread sense that much of what we’re told can’t be trusted. From potential mates to prospective employees, we’re no longer sure whom exactly we’re dealing with. Deception has become a routine part of the mating dance. Personnel officers take for granted that the resumes they read are padded. No wonder private investigation is a growth sector of the economy.
Post-truthfulness builds a fragile social edifice based on wariness. It erodes the foundation of trust that underlies any healthy civilization. When enough of us peddle fantasy as fact, society loses its grounding in reality. Society would crumble altogether if we assumed others were as likely to dissemble as tell the truth. We are perilously close to that point
August 11th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
You won’t have any trouble persuading me, given the youth-issue area I work in, that public lying by authorities, scientists, institutions, and media reporters is pandemic, indifferent, and responsive only to whether a lied-about source could hurt the liar (youth can’t). But what bothers me about this post is the casual assumption that there was a “truth era” in the past. There’s certainly no grounds for assuming that past generations were any more truthful in the contexts of their society, whether your source is Socrates, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Citizen Kane. We have more sophisticated ways of lying today, but also more sophisticated ways of detecting lies. The presumption that the past represented a time of greater morality and honesty and the present era some unique time of amorality seems to me, when investigated, to be a bad mistake. How, specifically, do you know the past was a “truth era”?
August 12th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I don’t think there was ever a time when were more disposed to be truthful, but there was a time when we lived more cheek by jowl in settings where lies were easier to spot, and the consequences greater for those spotted. In today’s mass, mobile, internetted society deception is such a facilitated commonplace as to be acceptable (”Everybody does it.”) With the possible exception of brain scans – which are expensive, cumbersome, and as yet unproven – the technological means we’ve developed to detect lies are more in the realm of gimmicks than reliable tools.
August 13th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I have noticed that I often lie during conversations. I think we might talk too quickly; our conversations move so rapidly and responses are expected to be immediate. I find that trying to respond so quickly only gives me enough time to respond from my ego, without carefully considering what I am about to say. It is very difficult for my own ego to take critisicm, due to a lack of confidence, and I suspect that I am not alone in feeling this way.