Philosophers have always debated about what constitutes truth and whether there is anything that can be claimed as non-falsifiable truth. According to the scientific method, all truth is falsifiable depending on new, verifiable evidence. Leaving philosophers and scientists aside, for the ordinary human being, truth has a variety of shades. In courts of law, witnesses have to distinguish between the ‘truth’, the ‘whole truth’ and ‘nothing but the truth’. The first and second assertions together imply that there must be some claims that are merely partial truths, as opposed to the whole truth. The third assertion implies that there must be something that is untruth or what we might call a falsehood. Falsehoods can have variety too. We talk about white lies, we hear about people who are compulsive liars, and we all do tell lies once in a while, often to get out of tricky situations or to defend ourselves from some unpleasant consequences. So alternative facts, Post-Truth societies, and fake news are nothing new in human history across different cultures and civilizations.
Associated with this truth-falsehood distinction, there is another related debate about whether there is anything called an absolute fact that is completely devoid of any value judgement: how some facts are selected from a set of facts, or how they are sequenced, represented and communicated. Usually, the distinction is made between descriptive claims of ‘what is’ against value statements like ‘what ought to be’. The ‘ought’ cannot be verified from facts. Similarly, there is an argument that claims no fact can be totally value-free. We are all hardwired into pre-analytical values that colour what we consider as fact and the boundaries we draw to define it. Hence, scientific claims of ‘what is’ cannot tell us much about right and wrong, or good and bad.
Given the somewhat fuzzy realm of truth and falsehoods and facts and values, how do we try to live in the age of Post-Truth, fake news and alternative facts? In everyday life, we do make distinctions, in our own imprecise ways, about what is a fact, or what is a lie, and so on. We do not split hairs and get into philosophical debates. Our perception of the world around us becomes a problem when we have alternative sources of information and they present different accounts of the same event. Or some events are mentioned in one source, while not in others. Who do we believe, especially when we ourselves cannot verify the claim?
Before we try to sort out the problem, we must appreciate the possible reasons of the purveyor of information in choosing facts, knowingly stating falsehoods, and why repetitive claims to show that already many people subscribe to the presented facts are important strategies for strengthening the acceptance of the message. The reasons can be very broadly divided into three categories. To begin with, people making a false claim can get some individual advantage out of it — material gains, power and recognition, and advertisement revenue for media and political influence. Next, the claimant could be looking to influence other people into believing what is being claimed and nudging them into altering their belief systems — instances of inter-faith marriage being portrayed as a planned strategy of domination by a particular religious group is an example. Finally, the claims could be made for creating or stirring up mischief — triggering a quarrel among friends, or stirring up a communal or a race riot.
There are many reasons behind the phenomenal spread of confusion and lies in the name of information or news. The first is a growing nexus among business, the media and politics as the capitalist economy grows and prospers. News and entertainment have blended into what is called infotainment. We consume news and demand a constant streaming of information. The second aspect of too much information is that it becomes equivalent to too little information because both cause equal confusion and prevent us from getting closer to what could be our perception of more reliable facts. The third reason revolves around the almost boundless opportunity to make one’s own belief or perception heard or known to the world at large, resulting in speech becoming careless — the 15 seconds of sound-bites or the 120 characters on hashtag. Anyone can claim anything without being held accountable. We need not think of, or ascertain, broad facts before opening our mouths or typing on the keyboard. This is independent of whether we have any mischievous agenda in mind.
We had made the assertion that a world of zero information is very much like a world of infinite information — confusing and incoherent. There is another similarity worth noting. The importance of physical objects is less in both these worlds, and the power of experiences and beliefs much stronger. It is difficult to extract facts in a world of fluid images and on-demand streaming of affective experiences.
There are some important consequences of living in a Post-Truth world where facts are less important than beliefs. Facts, as we noted, are never free from belief systems. We tend to focus on the ‘facts’ we like and are comfortable with. One good thing about this is that it leaves room for a struggle between alternative belief systems. If two different world-views vie for space in our belief systems, there will be a struggle for domination. The relative weight of a belief system will be determined by how many subscribers it has. This is why the ideology of the politically dominant becomes powerful enough to stifle alternative world views with both coercion as well as persuasion. All societies face this weight of power. The ‘facts’ of everyday life are socially constructed by power.
In the ambivalent world of facts and beliefs, one way to make the struggle for dominance meaningful is to look beyond the limits of our knowledge and focus on our ignorance; not in any pejorative sense but in terms of what we do not know yet. Perhaps that might induce us to raise more pertinent questions about our social life. Almost all of us have our own ideas and vision of a better world, the world we do not know yet. This vision might be eroded by informational confusion, but never entirely destroyed. We have to identify who our friends are, and who stand opposed to our ideas. In our own ways, all of us peddle lies and incomplete truths in different contexts. The point is to hone our beliefs by updating information we can decipher from the chaotic ambience. We need to seek out what is human and tolerant and discourage all we believe are undesirable. This struggle has to be a relentless one.
Anup Sinha is former professor of Economics, IIM Calcutta
