The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

by Michiko Kakutani

Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

The term “truth decay” (used by the Rand Corporation to describe the “diminishing role of facts and analysis” in American public life) has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it’s not just fake news either: it’s also fake science

to the television series The Affair, which hinge upon the idea of competing realities or unreliable narrators.

such disastrous and avoidable screwups resulted in a bungled American occupation that one soldier, assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, memorably described as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.” In fact, the Iraq war would prove to be one of the young century’s most catastrophic events, exploding the geopolitics of the region and giving birth to ISIS and a still unspooling set of disasters for the people of Iraq, the region, and the world. —

The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.

“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.”

And it was a reminder that in Orwell’s dystopia in 1984 there is no word for “science,” because “the empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded,” represents an objective reality that threatens the power of Big Brother to determine what truth is.

Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength”—to see whether the public and the “world conscience would still digest this dose.” And because they were reluctant to abandon their accustomed lives, their daily routines and habits, Zweig wrote, people did not want to believe how rapidly their freedoms were being stolen. People asked what Germany’s new leader could possibly “put through by force in a State where law was securely anchored, where the majority in parliament was against him, and where every citizen believed his liberty and equal rights secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution”—this eruption of madness, they told themselves, “could not last in the twentieth century.”

Central to the breakdown of official narratives in academia was the constellation of ideas falling under the broad umbrella of postmodernism, which arrived at American universities in the second half of the twentieth century via such French theorists as Foucault and Derrida (whose ideas, in turn, were indebted to the German philosophers Heidegger and Nietzsche). In literature, film, architecture, music, and painting, postmodernist concepts (exploding storytelling traditions and breaking down boundaries between genres, and between popular culture and high art) would prove emancipating and in some cases transformative,

To some postmodernists, the scholar Christopher Butler observes, even the arguments of scientists can be “seen as no more than quasi narratives which compete with all the others for acceptance. They have no unique or reliable fit to the world, no certain correspondence with reality. They are just another form of fiction.”

the scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that the writing and teaching of history had been politicized by a new generation of postmodernists: in viewing the past through the lenses of variables like gender and race, she argued, postmodernists were implying not just that all truths are contingent but that “it is not only futile but positively baneful to aspire to them.”

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science.’ There is only ‘German Science,’ ‘Jewish Science,’ etc.” When truth is so fragmented, so relative, Orwell noted, a path is opened for some “Leader, or some ruling clique” to dictate what is to be believed: “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened.”

Deconstruction posited that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers. In focusing on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of a text (and articulating such arguments in deliberately tangled and pretentious prose), it promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications: anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or commonsense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.

Our subjectivity is so completely our own. —SPIKE JONZE

With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts—a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans’ tendency to withdraw into “small private societies, united together by similitude of conditions, habits, and customs,” in order “to indulge themselves in the enjoyments of private life.” He worried that this self-absorption would diminish a sense of duty to the larger community, opening the way for a kind of soft despotism on the part of the nation’s rulers—power

I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.

THE VANISHING OF REALITY Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. —PHILIP K. DICK, “THE ELECTRIC ANT”

Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. —PHILIP K. DICK, “THE ELECTRIC ANT”

Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the 1960s,

In 1961, Philip Roth wrote of American reality, “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complained, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise…” Roth’s sense that actuality was exceeding fiction writers’ imagination (and throwing up real-life figures like Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn who were the envy of any novelist) would be echoed more than half a century later by writers of satire and spy thrillers in the Trump era.

Atwater’s cold-blooded use of that precept in using wedge issues to advance the GOP’s southern strategy—and to create the infamous Willie Horton ad in the 1988 presidential campaign—injected mainstream American politics with an alarming strain of win-at-all-costs Machiavellianism using mass media as a delivery system.

Baudrillard would take such observations further, suggesting that in today’s media-centric culture people have come to prefer the “hyperreal”—that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland—to the boring, everyday “desert of the real.” Artists like Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Federico Fellini grappled with similar themes, creating stories in which the borders between the real and the virtual, the actual and the imagined, the human and the post-human blur,

“Reality gave ground on more than one point,” Borges wrote. “The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet?

Thomas Pynchon’s novels explore similar themes—more relevant than ever in a world suffering from information overload. Reeling from a kind of spiritual vertigo, his characters wonder whether the paranoiacs have it right—that there are malign conspiracies and hidden agendas connecting all the dots. Or whether the nihilists are onto something—that there is no signal in the noise, only chaos and randomness. “If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” he wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 U.S. election on the BBC’s iPlayer platform, Curtis says in voice-over narration that people in the West had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.”

The official inauguration poster read, “No dream is too big, no challenge is to great.” And tickets for his first State of the Union address (which had to be reprinted) read, “Address to Congress on the State of the Uniom.” Harmless enough glitches, perhaps, but indicative of the administration’s larger carelessness and dysfunction—its cavalier disregard for accuracy, details, and precision.

After Amnesty International reported that up to thirteen thousand prisoners were killed at a military prison outside Damascus between 2011 and 2015, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said, “You can forge anything these days”—“We are living in a fake news era.”

an officer in the state security ministry declared, “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.”

Ur-fascism employs “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco added, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding. —RUDYARD KIPLING, 1890

In the three decades since the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine (which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues) and the two decades since Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, right-wing media has grown into a sprawling, solipsistic network that relentlessly repeats its own tropes

In an Orwellian move, Sinclair has even forced local news anchors to read a scripted message about “false news” that echoes President Trump’s own rhetoric undermining real reporting.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart. —WILLIAM GIBSON, ZERO HISTORY

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. —ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks”—including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions.

founder of Disinfomedia, identified by NPR as one Jestin Coler, claimed that he started the company to show how easily fake news spreads and that he enjoys “the game.” He said that he and his writers “tried to do similar things to liberals” but those efforts didn’t go viral the way stories aimed at Trump supporters do.

George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 was eerily clairvoyant about the dangers America now faces. In order to protect its future, he said, the young country must guard its Constitution and remain vigilant about efforts to sabotage the separation and balance of powers within the government that he and the other founders had so carefully crafted. Washington warned about the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who might try “to subvert the power of the people” and “usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” He warned about “the insidious wiles of foreign influence” and the dangers of “ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens” who might devote themselves to a favorite foreign nation in order “to betray or sacrifice the interests” of America.