If you think truth and a fact check is the answer? Don’t you believe it?
Of late I have been trying to stretch my thinking to incorporate a deeper construct of just what truth means or doesn’t mean.
I had grown up with a black and white version of what truth actually is.
Now observations have, almost certainly, even against my will, opened up a wider, if not uncomfortable appreciation of the depth of truth. Hence my previous two posts.
So I want to move on and explore just what might be done to prevent the language of Morrison from cementing a permanent place in Australian politics.
Firstly, though it’s important to understand just what those who uphold a more conventional view of, what truth is, are up against.
The left of politics doesn’t have a shock jock. The right of politics controls the radio airwaves.
Rupert Murdoch controls 70% of the news media in Australia.
The right of politics now almost wholly owns our television media. The exception, of course, is public broadcaster the ABC, who are regulated so as to give both sides of politics a fair go even if one side doesn’t have a case.
Then, of course, there is digital media where at least there is an equal playing field even if it is corrupted by the munificence of money on the right.
The result of this means that our lives have been controlled by the noise of the mass media. The sad thing is that we listen.
In doing so we have suffered collateral damage in so much as we have seen a significant rise in anti-media and post-truth and a wavering of the values of honesty, ethics and responsibility.
So, as you can see the left in Australia are really up against it when it comes to exposure.
Now let’s try to understand just what post-truth is. Ironically, and probably because lying in politics has become so bizarrely used in political language that it has become perhaps one of the most talked about meme words of our time.
The 2016 “Word of the Year Oxford English Dictionaries” entry described post-truth as the public burial of “objective facts” by an avalanche of media “appeals to emotion and personal belief”.
We live in a time where ordinary folk have discarded science, fact and reason for “self-truth”. A truth that is only comprehended by the individual. They have concluded that truth can be seen in perception, not what is but what they perceive it to be.
[textblock style=”4″]
We see what we are thinking and feeling; seldom what we are looking at.
[/textblock]
Because people have opted for their own particular personal truth rather than the science of it.
It is they who shout the loudest. The rest of us are content with the facts we enquired about. Often our opinions are based on feelings rather than their understanding and the difficulty is separating the two.
[textblock style=”4″]
Life is about perception. Not what is but what we perceive it to be.
[/textblock]
In 2018 The Conversation online told us that “post-truth” was only a short journey to bullshit. That bullshit was part and parcel of the Trump/Morrison era of telling lies, half-truths, exaggeration and plain old gilding the lily:
Ever greater sections of the population are ready to ignore facts, and even to accept obvious lies willingly. Not the claim to truth, but the expression of the ‘felt truth’ leads to success in the ‘post-factual age’.
Post-truth depends as well on buffoonery, bits and pieces of colourful communication designed to attract and distract public attention and to interrupt the background noise of conventional politics and public life.
Post-truth also includes forms of public discourse commonly called bullshit. It comprises communication that displaces and nullifies concerns about veracity. Bullshit is hot air talk, verbal excrement that lacks nutrient. It is shooting off at the mouth, backed by the presumption that it is acceptable to others in the conversation.
Post-truth depends as well on buffoonery, bits and pieces of colourful communication designed to attract and distract public attention and to interrupt the background noise of conventional politics and public life.
It is tantamount to placing one’s emotion before one’s logic.
[textblock style=”4″]
Bullshitting is bad enough but when someone believes their own, that is intellectual dishonesty.
[/textblock]
So how do we overcome this bullshit, this buffoonery of endless lies, assertions of fake news and repetitive false opinion?
Have we really reached the point in politics where TRUTH is something that politicians have persuaded us to believe, like “alternative facts” rather than TRUTH based on factual evidence, arguments, observation and reason?
When the Prime Minister makes a false statement about our Co2 emissions saying we will meet our Paris commitments in a cantor, and he repeats it over and over.
James Fernyhough noticed after Morrison’s elevation to the top job:
Australia’s new prime minister Scott Morrison showed this week he has mastered one of US President Donald Trump’s most amazing tricks: the ability to make claims he and every one else knows are complete nonsense – and to make them with total impunity.
When he continues to make this statement even when his own department and various fact-checkers say he is wrong.
[textblock style=”4″]
People often argue from within the limitations of their understanding and when their factual evidence is scant, they revert to an expression of their feelings.
[/textblock]
How do we rebut him?
The Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita – of Romulus My Father fame – in 2017 wrote an essay in which he explored the principle of post-truth and how we might improve our relationships with others.
Writing in The Canberra Times, of post-truth Kim Hyunh observes that:
First, instead of constant polling, we can judge and assess truths via a “call to seriousness”. To say, “Get serious will ya!” or ask, “Seriously?” is not to be snide or dismiss someone as “a joke”. Nor is it purely fact checking. Rather it means engaging in good faith and robust conversations about common issues of substance.
This might mean asking, “On what authorities are our claims based? Have we considered the best possible information sources? Are we speaking with humility and confidence about things we know well, or are we bullshitting? Do we need to place a check on our interests and emotions?
But for me a call to seriousness also means regarding others in the same way that Trump supporters regard their president. A CNN reporter famously said that Trump’s critics took him literally but not seriously, while for his supporters it was the other way around. In supporting people in our lives, it is valuable to take them seriously, but not always literally.
Olivier Goldhill in a piece for Quartz said this:
The fact that so many people are upset at Trump’s lies shows that we still value and recognize the truth. “At the moment, enough people are aghast, and precisely because they expect people to be truthful about what they’ve said,” says Blackburn. In other words, the distress over “post-truth” discourse is in itself an indication that truth lives on.
I would be the first to admit that we are really up against it. We have a formidable list of opponents stacked against us. There is an urgent need for our schools’ curriculum to include a politics component.
If you find yourself in a discussion on a debating site present your facts ask them for theirs and be polite. What the post-truth believers want you to do is lose your block. Don’t. Be polite and get out of the debate. They hate politeness.
Sites like The AIMN play an important role in so much as we keep the faithful well-informed, supplied with the facts, ideas and opinions, contrary thoughts and self-criticism.
The Australian Government is full of some of the most committed liars we have ever witnessed and you can, now that they have confirmed that they can get away with it, be assured that it will get worse before it gets better.
A recent survey conducted for the Royal Society Open Science showed that, in Australia, once politicians were caught out lying around four times the support for them declined.
A similar survey in the US showed that even when politicians lied up to 80% of the time, support for them barely wavered.
The survey results raised the question about the importance of fact-checking what politicians say, with findings showing that voters came to a decision based on “emotion and gut feelings” rather than the facts.
There was a time when Australian politicians, where caught lying, inadvertently or on purpose, or by mistake, they would immediately correct themselves.
Nowadays when confronted with an opposing view that has commonly accepted facts on its side:
“All of Trump’s lies that contradicted commonly accepted facts challenged the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment, which are premised on the belief that there are objective facts discoverable through investigation, empirical evidence, rationality, and the scientific methods of enquiry.” (brookings.edu, April 13, 2018).
They will still lie.
[textblock style=”4″]
My thought for the day
Do you shape the truth for the sake of a good impression? On the other hand, do you tell the truth even if it may tear down the view people may have of you? Alternatively, do you simply use the contrivance of omission and create another lie. I can only conclude that there is always pain in truth but there is no harm in it.
[/textblock]
[textblock style=”7″]
Like what we do at The AIMN?
You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.
Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
[/textblock]
