post-truth machine

Learned vanity, which exceeds that of every other kind, still takes up arms against any thing that is offered as new

“I think the biggest challenge [with] higher education today is the growing economic and racial segregation,” Pasquerella said.

But let's properly define the problem. History and experience tell me it's not a post-truth era: Facts have always been hard to separate from falsehoods, and political partisans have always made it harder. It's better to call this a post-trust era.

Step one: You lie yourself, all the time. Step two: You say it’s your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step three: Everyone looks around and says, “What is truth? There is no truth.”

What is the practical effect of this new truth on everyday life? Well, consider one example. In Turkey today, we are obliged to indulge a debate about whether minors should be married to their rapists. It is predicated on the “real people’s” truth that in rural areas girls get married even when they are just 13, and thus have sexual maturity. It is, we are told, a thoroughly elitist argument to insist that a minor cannot give consent.

this mobilised and organised ignorance has no time for any kind of intellect, even that which helped it capture the political stage in the first place.

We found, as you are now finding, that the new truth-building process does not require facts or the underpinning of agreed values. We were confronted – as you are being confronted – by a toxic vocabulary: “elite”, “experts”, “real people” and “alienated intellectuals”. The elite, with experts as mouthpieces of that oppressive elite, were portrayed as people detached from society, willing to suppress the needs, choices and beliefs of “real people”.