The Post-Truth Era ?

It was the word of the year. Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ”. The concept itself has been existing for more than a decade, but there seems to have been a higher frequency in the context of the Brexit and the presidential election in the United States. In fact, the post-truth era has emerged because of several long-cycle trends that affect how we make sense of the world around us. This phenomenon has a name agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. We used to have truth versus lies. Nowadays we have truth, lies, and some sort of statements that might be false, but are considered too benign to be really discarded. We’d rather use euphemisms, or tell “the truth improved.” The political correctness lead us to a ridiculous molieresque mimicry. For instance, we no longer call a liar a liar, but an “ethically challenged” person, someone for whom “the truth is temporarily unavailable.” This is the so-called post-truth. In the post-truth era, frontiers are blurred between truth and lie, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction. Deceiving others became a habit, a challenge, even a game. Researchers argue that we presently tell lies on a daily basis. Globalization and the World Wide Web determined an important raise in the volume of strangers and acquaintances in our lives rises, on of the results being a widespread sense that much of what we’re told can’t be