Some interesting features of the “post-truth” time-warp that we’re all finding ourselves in:
1. The web empowers anyone to start rumors.
2. Negative rumors can be started and spread quickly, and can do irreversible damage before they are detected or debunked.
3. Negative rumors (esp. conspiracy theories) are based on simply sowing doubts (like the OJ Simpson dream team’s defence).
4. As nothing is certain other than the provable truths of mathematics and Descartes’ Cogito, everything else is susceptible to negative rumors.
5. Positive evidence takes much more work to adduce.
6. And the general populace is much more susceptible to negative rumors.
It’s a kind of a perverse side-effect of what Karl Popper pointed out about scientific theories: Unlike mathematical theorems, you can never prove they’re true, only that they’re false (with one piece of negative evidence). And evidence is subject to interpretation.
It reminds one also of the malleability and mutability of laws and constitutions: They too depend on interpretation. And interpretation depends on authoritative opinion. And authority is conferred on the basis of… take your pick: popular opinion or authoritarian diktat.
Online-era populism may be the soft underbelly of democracy.
Let’s hope the US labyrinth of checks and balances can weather the post-truth storm. Hungary’s is already a shipwreck.