Post - Truth

                             Post Truth 

Post-truth is a philosophical and political concept for "the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth" and the "circuitous slippage between facts or alternative facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth".

 Post-truth according to my understanding 

    One person does and other runs behind (him/her) without knowing (believes in that particular thing)whether it is right or wrong. 

Funny side of the post-truth ear

 The presidential election which gave birth (Almost felt like) to this terminology, the result was a scandal-dominated election process that was mainly fought on social media and spreading their propaganda. It was a game of perception than facts.

Perception Vs Reality

For example: When we hear something positive about a good friend or a person, we have a tendency of believing it without doing a fact check. Same goes the other way around: if we don‘t like someone and hear something bad about them, we might also believe it without fact checking. It would be exhausting to fact check everything we hear. Trust is an important thing to us. We want to believe and not doubt everything we hear. We don‘t want to question everybody we talk to.

As always in life, it should be about the balance of trusting and verifying. It seems like over the last few years we became a little lazy on checking facts and a little heavy on emotions.

If we look at the Media industry, health industry and their advertisements, we might ask ourselves how much facts versus how much emotion are being presented to us. There are a lot of promises around many products that might not be worth the money.

The pharmaceutical industry understands that we choose with our feelings and that we don‘t have time to read scientific surveys. See the 5000% price increase and to make it sound moral and just. If a pain-killer promises us that the pain will end and we can enjoy our days with our family, that sounds great. But what about the side-effects of taking pain-killers? We don‘t want to hear it.

In current stressful life and instant gratification age, If someone would offer you some pills to take to cure your pain or depression within a week, most would probably believe in it. This is the age of Millennial.

As human beings, we try to find the easiest and most convenient way through most situations. We want to avoid unpleasant feelings and achieve happiness. We only read the news that supports our belief systems or we maybe even completely ignore the news, as we feel that we can‘t do anything about it and don‘t want to get upset by politics.

Unfortunately, this strategy leads to elections like we just saw or the social change what we are witnessing. If we tune into the news every four years, it‘s hard to tell what‘s true and what‘s not. We don‘t know who to trust.

As painful or wonderful as this Trump victory or Brexit might be for some of us only time will tell,  but let‘s use this occasion as an opportunity to understand and redefine the way we do things, or the way we form out opinions or the way we passed judgement on everything in the society. Let‘s start talking about how we would like it to be done.

Maybe someday someone read or listen to our ideas and who knows? we all can become part of the solution and not of the problem. Maybe we need to take the time and look at “the facts” to protect us from “fake news”.

Back in Europe, the Oxford English Dictionary awarded “post-truth” word of the year for 2016. Their too-narrow definition refers to political speech that owes no allegiance to facts, but that instead targets the anger and prejudices of certain groups. “Post-truth” politicians do not just lie, they have an Orwellian contempt for facts, even countable facts such as whether crime rates are low, or global temperatures are high. Once upon a time, we could rely on experts, technocrats, scientists, judges, and policy wonks to keep their lies in check, and to be the evidential, rational, and legal ballast in the ideological and political tempests. Now they are derided and dismissed, labeled “so-called judges”, “so-called experts”.

Post-truth politicians do not just attack experts, they go after the media. In dozens of countries, not just the US, they use their media access and power to spread lies in ways not seen since McCarthy’s “reds under the bed.” When that fails, they assassinate (in Russia), close them down (in Turkey), restrict media access (in the US), or brand them the enemy – “the real opposition party” according to Trump advisor Steve Bannon. This makes the media’s job impossible. They aspire to Olympian neutrality, but if they simply parrot what people say without fact-checking, they do a disservice to us all. However, when the media do fact-check they appear to be taking sides – this is inevitably the case when one side of the debate is looser with facts than the other. Nor are the media blameless victims in the truth wars – they need viewers so (in caricature) prefer drama to substance, urgent news to important news, and edutainment (charismatic quacks, gurus-du-jour, celebrity anti-scientists, and diet-fad peddlers) to education.

Despite this, we cannot either blame post-truth politicians or the media. Politicians lying might not matter at all – if we didn’t elect them, but we do! Who wins elections matters, but in the long-run, it is more important that our culture values truth and our institutions that produce it. Just as each of us has a role to play in saving the environment, e.g. recycling and moderating energy use, each of us has a role to play in creating our culture, daily, through what behaviors we say yes to.

The newest weapon in the truth wars is the internet. We once hoped that the internet would deliver greater access to knowledge, and make us wiser, connected, globally aware, and more reasonable. It has not. On social media, trolling, rants, fabrications, and hate-speech propagate more quickly than reasoned arguments and civil discussion. More than half of Americans, and nearly half of Europeans now get their news first online. Diversification of “news” producers mean fringe beliefs can aggregate, form communities, and attract sympathetic followers. Paradoxically, the science of how networks work creates “the majority illusion”, where the reach of fringe views is disproportionately amplified and so attracts more interest than orthodox ones. Algorithms (essentially) tell you what you want to hear – if you believe Pope Francis endorsed candidate Trump, more “news” like that will fill your inbox. “Likes” and “shares” tend to be emotional-impulsive, rather than reasoned-evaluative judgments: the limbic system, rather than the cerebral cortex does the liking. Popularity “trumps” accuracy. Social media trains us in appalling conversational habits: for example, name-calling, not listening, stereotyping, and not sharing assumptions or reasoning. Again, this is a cultural issue. We all, mostly, “know” what healthy debate looks like, but we get better at what we practice – i.e. practice being a Neanderthal and you get better at that rather than the good conversations skills you (in theory) “know.”

What is Fake-News?

Fake news can be divided into three kinds. The first kind is news that is deliberately “made-up” and that the “perp” knows is manufactured. The second kind is news that is unarguably false, yet in the minds of the writer/ publisher is true. The third kind is satirical, from publications such as The Onion, who do not pretend what they say is the truth, yet has the appearance of a news article.

The most important problem of our time may then be the post-truth problem because solving our other problems democratically depends upon solving that first.” (Paul Gibbons