THE most fashionable word after Brexit and Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016 as US
president-elect was “post-truth”, roughly defined as the “cherry-picking of data to
support emotive politics”.
If there is no truth or objective facts, because all media is subject to manipulation,
then are we living in “Alt-future”, an alternative future where there are no truths, only
selective lies?
The Nazi propaganda chief Paul Joseph Goebbels was reputed to have said that if
you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe
it.
Allow me to be brutally honest – objective truths are theoretical fictions – truth, like
beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, just as history is written by the victors. We have
grown up in the age of science, in which there are theoretically, immutable laws of
nature, which we can test or repeatedly test to verify.
But human behaviour is always changing, just as time moves forward, so that
observations about human nature do not conform to laws of nature. There is always
an element of uncertainty, which means that truths about human behaviour,
especially its predictability, is always subjective, never fully objective.
We are living in a “post-truth” age, because the newly-elected leader of the United
States, the dominant global economy, is quite economical with his facts, opinions and
policies, which are clearly not what we are used to under past US leaders. If the new
victor starts re-writing history, then will Trump’s “post-truth” become the New Normal
for alternative futures?
Trump was elected because his electoral supporters are so fed up with the
conventional wisdom that “if the sane does not work, try the insane”. The established
newspapers and television, including Hillary Clinton, were so concerned with the
inconsistencies of Trump with known facts that they spent all the time attacking him.
They failed to recognise that a large part of the electorate were already not listening
– they wanted a change from the present.
Living in an Information Age, where we are bombarded by massive doses of
information in 24x7 real-time, most of us have difficulty discerning fact from fiction.
The events of the last decade, revealed through WikiLeaks and Snowden, have
shown that fact is often more spectacular than fiction. These facts are unfolding
before our very eyes – how the Russian ambassador can be assassinated before TV
cameras, how terrorists can shoot up Christmas festivities. It is therefore not
surprising that we are easily fooled by small lies, white lies and big lies.
How should we cope in this age of “post-truths”? To answer this, we need to
understand what is considered to be “truth”.
Ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas basically argue that truth is what
corresponds to facts. But modern philosophers like Bertrand Russell reject this
because truth then becomes ideal, which may not correspond with facts. Some facts
are believable or verifiable, whereas lies can be proven to be false.
Inconvenient truths
Note that if my experience was such that a lie worked for me, I may not believe a fact
even if it is shown to me. Human beings love to delude themselves – inconvenient
truths are covered up by convenient lies.
The issue of truth or falsehood lies at the heart of human behaviour, because
everyday we have to make decisions on whether to cooperate or not to cooperate –
humans work with each other through the process of exchange, trade or bargaining
based on the available information that each has.
Software specialists and management consultants today recommend that we deal
with information overload through Big Data, using sophisticated computer
programmes to analyse all sorts of data. That itself is not strictly fact. The old adage
“garbage in, garbage out” remains true – if Big Data is fed lots of faulty data, you can
get misleading or even wrong results. All you have achieved is to pay lots more to get
more rubbish conclusions – the only justification that since it was very expensive, the
result must be very good.
This is another case of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, when
individuals feel discomfort being confronted with contradictory beliefs or facts.
Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling (1921-2016) who only just passed away last month,
was awarded his Nobel Prize for his work on improving understanding of conflict and
cooperation through game-theory analysis. His seminal work “The Strategy of
Conflict” (1960) was very influential in social theory because he moved away from the
idealist work of game theory on social co-operation towards the more realistic work of
conflicts.
In other words, life is not just about giving rewards for good behaviour, but actual and
credible threats that enforces good behaviour. “Post-truths” are alteration of facts to
induce social behaviour in line with what those in charge want. The left-leaning
liberals push for “soft” incentives like rewards and subsidies, whereas the right-
leaning hard-liners push for “hard” incentives like punishment, law-enforcement and
walls to protect against immigrants and outsiders.
What we can assess from known facts is that society has moved far more right, in
which conflict and possible war is an outcome to solve problems for the US. It is by
no means clear that the existing institutions of checks and balance within the US can
stop this trend becoming reality. This means that life has become much more
complicated for everyone, especially in Asia, because we can be sure that there will
be more bashing of China, Iran or whoever that disagrees with the Trump
administration.
We are using the language of computers more and more to communicate with each
other. Post-truths can easily become alt-facts, shift-news or ctrl-data – information on
our keyboard or screens that someone wants us to consider as truths. What do we
normally do when we get into such messy computer situations? We press
Ctrl+Alt+Del and go for Reset.
Be prepared for Alt-Futures of greater uncertainty.
Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective.
A version of this article appeared in The Star Online, 7 January 2017
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