Post Truth is the new political culture.
Also known as post-factual and post-reality.
This term was first used by the late Serbian- American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation.( This is according to Oxford Dictionary)
This represents an era of politics which beliefs in moving with emotions and totally ignoring the presented facts. The facts hold no importance in such debates.
These self explanatory terms means when the argument is accepted on the basis on emotions, beliefs and other non factual factors. The debates are driven by ones’ emotions and not by the facts and evidences.
It is totally disconnected with the objective certitude. In such situation or era, emotional persuasions are far more important all the available facts.
This term was used earlier and now it is ascending in different countries. All the misbeliefs, misconceptions are triggered by the advancing Internet. Internet has almost thoughts, words and data on every imaginable topic. The details conceived via internet can be false and misleading.
People debating tend to gather information and their debating pointers via this thing. So they create a “post-truth” situation based on misbeliefs, emotions, perceptions of people.
Post truth is also when a debator includes points or attacks his partner with a nonfactual statement. That statement is not false but not even a proven truth. Therefore, its not even wrong to include it in your debate. The statement is completely based on emotions and perceptions. This is just for the sake of not losing and yet making a mark on the oppositions.
Social media and internet has made this era again a ground of with such occurring debates. They are filled with post truths without rebuttals by different publishers.
As every individual has different perception to such post truths. This brings up different other topics on light based on the content. It then creates an environment for emotional appeals and decreases the legitimacy of itself.
All of these combinedly shapes the views of people regarding the related political issues and figures.
⚫What led to the era of post-truth ? Are we living in post-truth era?
The modern, information era is the hardest era for ‘truth’, as a societal construct. The cause it he diffusion of information sources, from trusted authorities to ‘basically anyone’. Lacking trust in centralized sources, we now have the ability to exist in a ‘post truth’ world, a bubble of our own making.
⚫WHAT IS TRUTH?
Post-Truth can only be described empirically, not philosophically, at least in a way that most people can believe in.
Truth is a, empirically, statements one or more people agree on. Nothing more, nothing less.
You can say something simple and observable (ie ‘one line is longer than another’) but repeated studies show that a LARGE percentage of humans will deny the ‘objective’ reality for the social reality.
⚫POST TRUTH?
It used to be that truth was more ‘standardized’. With fewer information sources, each source had a greater ‘authority.’
When you have 2 newspapers (or only 1), it becomes harder to have a viewpoint other than one of those.
This is because other viewpoints are either unfamiliar or socially unacceptable. Both require extremely costly effort to overcome.
Today, anybody can post any viewpoint. The ‘liberation’ of information has led to a ‘diffusal’ of authority.
This fact is what I believe we refer to when we speak of post truth.
⚫POST TRUTH FOREVER?
The real question is how long can a post-truth society interact and remain?
There already exist multiple societies with different versions of ‘truth’. We often call these groups of people ‘religion.’ People who fundamentally and sometimes radically disagree on the nature of reality. ‘Political parties’ also fill this gap.
Wars have been fought over both.
Violent conflict tends to require both parties to agree on something. That something often gets boiled down to truth. Why? Likely because it’s the easiest thing to agree on.
We’ll see how long this bubble lasts, but for the moment it isn’t looking good for ‘truth’
⚫ Some Examples of the world of " post - truth " ⚫
India has been a post-truth society for years (and maybe the West has too):
Major social change does not happen within the space of a year. Yet, to a large number of observers around the world, the “post-truth” phenomenon seemed to emerge from nowhere in 2016.
Two key events of 2016 shaped our understanding of the post-truth world: one was in June, when Britain voted in favour of leaving the European Union. The other was in November, when political maverick Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States of America. Trump’s administration spent the third day of his presidency speaking of “alternative facts”, and making false claims about the size of the crowds that had attended his inauguration.
For the rest of the world, the importance of both Trump and Brexit can best be gauged by understanding that they happened in the USA and in the UK. The UK was the key driving force of the world from the 19th century until the second world war, the US has been ever since. The US and the UK often have shared a similar point of view on many global geopolitical developments, as strategic allies or by virtue of their “special relationship”.
⚫The dominant Western narrative
The mainstream English-language media are largely concentrated in the US and UK, and as such dominate the global news agenda. Had these surprising electoral results happened in any other two nations, the impact of the “post-truth” narrative would surely have been lesser.
Of course, events of such historical importance in quick succession, across the Atlantic, would naturally shake up English-speaking Western intellectuals.
But there is an argument to be made that the US and the UK have been living in denial of facts and evidence for years. In 2003, after all, both the countries went to war in Iraq over the false notion that Saddam Hussein was harbouring weapons of mass destruction.
Post-truth could also mean that a section of the elite in the US and the UK are facing a reality they never expected. When elites are not comfortable with the truth, the term “post-truth” emerges. One who seeks facts from one set of events will face the charge of ignoring evidence from another set of events.
Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn told us a long time ago that the narrative of the Western mainstream media and politicians do not necessarily represent people’s interests.
The world has largely been influenced by what the US and the UK mainstream media and policy-makers think; what rest of the world thought about truth has always mattered less.
Wake up and smell the post-truth
As years pass by, and as we in the rest of the world have more willingness to accept that the US and the UK did not help bring peace or stability in Afghanistan, Iraq or many other places, we realise that we have long been living in a post-truth world, where the landscape of reality was largely seen from the perspectives that these powers, in solidarity of the two governments and the elite mainstream media, wanted us to see.
There can surely be an argument that there is no credible uniform narrative echoing from the internally divided US and UK now. For the US, even the relationship with old foes, such as Russia, is no longer clear.
An increase in partisanship in the US has seen stark divisions arise, with intelligence agencies and the mainstream media on one side, and the alternate media siding with organisations such as WikiLeaks on the other, often sharing narratives emerging from Kremlin-funded media outlets such as RT. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton belong to the former club; Donald Trump, as of now, to the latter - driven by convenience.
Binary pictures always failed to represent real-life complexity, some of us have suddenly woken up to realise it.
⚫India: home of post-truth politics
That was the global context of post-truth politics and its advent in the West. But as the US and UK wake up to this new era, it’s worth noting that the world’s largest democracy has been living in a post-truth world for years.
From education to health care and the economy, particularly its slavish obsession with GDP, India can be considered a world leader in post-truth politics.
India’s post-truth era cannot be traced to a single year – its complexities go back generations. But the election of Narendra Modi in 2014 can be marked as a significant inflection point. Ever since, the country has existed under majoritarian rule with widely reported discrimination against minorities.
India’s version of post-truth is different to its Western counterparts due to the country’s socioeconomic status; its per capita nominal income is less than 3% of that of the US (or 4% of that of the UK). Still, post-truth is everywhere in India.
It can be seen in our booming Wall Street but failing main streets, our teacher-less schools and our infrastructure-less villages. We have the ability to influence the world without enjoying good governance or a basic living conditions for so many at home.
Modi’s government has shown how key decisions can be completely divorced from the everyday lives of Indian citizens, but spun to seem like they have been made for their benefit. Nowhere is this more evident than with India’s latest demonetisation drive, which plunged the country into crisis, against the advice of its central bank, and hit poorest people the hardest.
Despite the levels of extreme poverty in India, when it comes to social development, the cult of growth dominates over the development agenda, a trend that Modi has exacerbated, but that started with past governments.
The dichotomy of India’s current post-truth experience was nicely summed up by Arun Shourie, an influential former minister from Modi’s own party. He disagrees with the prime minister, just as many Republicans share sharp differences of opinion with President Trump.
Shourie said the policies of the current administration were equal to his predecessors’ policies, plus a cow.
⚫Context is everything
India’s post-truth landscape may be a harbinger of what’s to come for the US and the UK. Certainly, there are echoes in both nations of the nationalism narrative that swept Modi to power in 2014.
Each nation and each society has its individual interpretation of the post-truth political world and its impact on the social and economic landscape. Back in 2012, Justice Anthony M Kennedy, in scrutinising former president Barrack Obama’s health-care reform said, “most questions in life are matters of degree.”
And so it is with post-truth politics. We have always lived in some form of the post-truth era, to varying degrees. But if this current manifestation of the phenomenon is a response to the fact that too much “political correctness” or “identity politics” did not go well with the majority in either India or the US and the UK, too much protectionism is also likely to have devastating consequences.
In any democratic society, the pendulum of public opinion swings from one pole to another. In the US and the UK, as in India, we are now seeing the pendulum swing to a populist, or post-truth extreme.
For all three countries, the assumption is that as the pendulum swings more in one direction, the invisible forces of democracy will eventually work to bring balance, which will lead to a swing in the opposite direction.
But that also assumes that no untoward large-scale irreversible damage is done to the world in between swings. And yes, that is a big assumption, given where the world stands now.
⚫ Trump and Modi: birds of the same feather, but with different world views
Donald Trump’s election as the 45th US president illustrates the global ascendance of the political right. Comparisons with Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose rise predates Trump’s by two years, are inevitable. The two leaders share an evident admiration for each other. Both are hugely popular among their respective constituencies – Hindu nationalists for Modi and white supremacists for Trump – and highly resented by those who disagree with them. Both are polarising figures, who espouse deeply divisive agendas. Despite their many similarities, however, they are also remarkably different in important ways.
First, the commonalities. Modi and Trump are both powerful orators, who connect well with their audiences. They speak with rhetorical flourishes, cleverly appropriating popular discontent with existing governments. Humour is key to their communication as they drive home their propaganda. Both show themselves to be strong leaders who can get things done. They deride the complex bureaucratic mechanisms that have come to characterise the polities of their respective countries.
Modi’s electoral campaigns were replete with references to the so-called Gujarat model, showcasing the prosperous western Indian state he ruled for over a decade as one where projects were implemented and decisions were taken. In the same vein, Trump has made much of his business acumen, highlighting his numerous financial successes and ability as a deal maker as evidence of his decisiveness. More tragically, both have run campaigns against religious and racial minorities, and against relief and welfare provisions for the poor.
⚫ Outsiders with ties to big business
Both are shrewd strategists. They exploited the first-past-the-post system to their advantage so that even as they won a minority of the popular vote – Modi and his allies won less than 40%, Trump, 46.7% – they also secured thumping majorities in the legislatures and steered their respective parties to comfortable victories.
Support for business interests is at the nub of the similarities between the two men. That Modi and top Indian business barons share a cosy relationship is no secret. His intimacy with two families, the Adanis and the Ambanis, are well-known. Trump is an executive for about 500 business entities and is clearly sympathetic to and embedded within business interests. But both leaders have carefully calibrated their support for big business by forging coalitions with the middle classes of their respective countries.
Modi and Trump have both made much of being from outside the corridors of power. They have revelled in being described as outsiders of the “establishment” in New Delhi and Washington DC respectively. Yet, there is much irony in such claims. Modi was a well-established politician whose rise was championed by big businesses. Trump was a well-connected businessman with well-known proximity to the establishment, irrespective of whether it was ruled by Clinton or Bush. It is a testimony to their demagoguery and their ability to manipulate the media that they seem to have successfully pulled off their bluff.
Economic and social minorities remain suspicious of both leaders. Certainly, not all the people who voted for either politician were Hindu supremacists or white nationalists. But it is certainly true that economic and social minorities remained unimpressed. Only 24% of India’s poor and 31% of the working class supported Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014, contrasted to almost 38% of the “upper” classes. While 55% of India’s “upper castes” voted for Modi, only 25% of the Dalits (historically stigmatised as untouchables) and 7% of Muslims did.
Indications from the first CNN exit polls after the 2016 US election, suggest the majority of the privileged classes also voted for Trump, while a majority of the poor voted against him. These initial exit polls also showed that 57% of white people rallied around Trump, while 89% of black people voted for his opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump and Modi are emerging as products of “elite revolts” against an establishment that was no longer the preserve of privileged social groups. They were not, as some liberal commentators have suggested, elected simply due to a revolt by the poor.
⚫ Diverging views and experience
Despite their similarities, it is important not to overlook the differences between the two men, particularly in their personal backgrounds, political experience and attitudes towards globalisation.
The social differences between Modi and Trump could not be wider. Modi was born into a family of grocers in a rural area of western India, and grew up helping his father sell tea at railway stations. Trump, by contrast, was born into privilege and inherited the Trump fortune, amassed over an entire century. The trajectories of the two men reveal much about the hugely different political narratives in the US and India.
Modi comes with far greater political experience than Trump does. Modi’s rise within the ranks of his BJP, while impressive, is by no means exceptional. Before being elected as India’s premier, he ruled Gujarat for two full terms. During this time, he consolidated his position within the party hierarchy. Modi is an insider within the BJP, having apprenticed under senior leaders of the party. By contrast, Trump is an outsider even to the Republican Party. This has also meant that while Modi carries huge political baggage, including serious allegations that he presided over the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat during the summer of 2002 – which he denies – Trump is not the focus of such charges.
Modi’s public speeches suggest that he is favourably disposed towards globalisation, having invited world manufacturers to “make in India”, and promising to dismantle the regulatory hurdles that put off foreign investors. Trump, however, appears to be more inward-looking. Despite his own corporate investments, Trump has ranted against US jobs being “Bangalored” – moved to the Indian city – potentially conflicting with his Indian counterpart’s economic dreams.
So, what can we expect over the next few years in the world’s oldest democracy, given what we know about the world’s largest? For starters, we can expect social cleavages in the US to sharpen as provocations by white supremacists increase. Just as cow vigilante groups espousing an ideology of Hindu supremacy have been emboldened under Modi’s rule, we can expect displays of bigotry and hatred in the coming years, unless President Trump nips these in the bud.
We can also expect attitudes towards the poor to harden. Modi has mocked India’s extensive social protection system, claiming it promotes dependence. His recent decision to demonetise India’s economy has disproportionately hurt those with the least. We can expect the Trump administration to wage similar war on the poor. But above all, we can expect the muzzling of dissent that is the touchstone of a vibrant democracy. Modi’s government has targeted a number of people opposed to his government’s views, not sparing even students in the process. Trump will likely to be only too eager to borrow a leaf or two from Modi.
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