The Death of Truth
Beyond Fitness
We are at war. This war isn’t a function of natural resources, religion, or territory disputes but it is epistemic.
There is a war on truth, knowledge, and objectivity online and in our lives. We see it as professionals in the fitness space all the time, people claiming wacky diets or exercises are superior despite no strong evidence of this being the case.
A classic example is the carnivore diet, which posits to be superior for health because you’re eating all if not mostly meat. Despite the evidence that plant-based diets are generally superior for numerous health outcomes, this carnivore myth persists.
Now the main question is… Why?
We could blame the general public’s lack of knowledge concerning nutrition and health, we could also blame marketing tactics, but more fundamentally we need to look at the current assault on truth.
Post-Truth World
Philosopher Lee Mcintyre’s book Post Truth gives us a glimpse at the current assault on truth. While Mcintyre uses Brexit and the 2016 US election as primary examples there are cases of this worldwide just from a political perspective.
But what do we even mean by “post-truth”? We know there is a difference between lies, falsehoods, and bullshit… yet this is distinct from post-truth.
If we were to read philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit, we would describe bullshitting as indifference toward truth. People bullshit to subvert truth for their own aims, this can apply to political pundits across the political spectrum.
However, post-truth is more insidious than bullshit as it requires a certain level of denialism and self-deception not only on an individual but group level.
In its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie.
- Post Truth by Lee Mcintyre
Post-truth can be devastating leading to the death of others and the destruction of the planet. For example, South African President Thabo Mbeki claimed that antiretroviral drugs were part of a Western plot and that garlic and lemon juice could be used to treat AIDS. This lie leads to the deaths of over 300,000 people. Similarly, we can point to the influence of conspiracy theories on the covid-19 pandemic… how many preventable deaths were caused in part by the divergence of truth?
Alternate Realities
It often seems science deniers, trolls, and conservatives, in general, are living in an alternate reality. Believing things like the covid mRNA vaccines are dangerous and the 2020 election was stolen.
What if I told you these individuals are? What if they are living in an alternate reality filled with "alternate" facts about the world?
In Jonathan Rauch's book The Constitution of Knowledge, such an argument is made. The political right in the United States has seceded not merely by ideology but epistemically.
There is a blatant disregard for the truth, facts, statistics, and the institutions entrusted with them. Look at the political beliefs during the pandemic, it is typically conservatives who downplayed the impact of SARS-CoV-2 and were less reluctant to receive the vaccine. This was despite the evidence the virus is dangerous and the vaccines are safe and effective.
Even more brazenly, from a political perspective, January 6th, 2021 saw an attack on the Capitol Building. This attack was based on a lie the election results were fraudulent despite no evidence indicating this was the case.
Even more problematic is the overwhelming amount of disinformation we are exposed to online perpetuating this epistemic split from reality.
The purpose of Russian disinformation campaigns is not to get you to believe the falsehood but to exhaust your ability to think critically. Disinformation is meant to overwhelm and fill the arena of ideas full of bullshit.
This goes against the idealistic phrase "good ideas beat out bad ideas" when we cannot differentiate between good or bad ideas in the first place. No one can possibly know anything so we might as well believe everything.
As Rauch describes, this is the exact opposite of censorship, there is just too much information to swim through so you end up drowning in it. This situation is even more insidious than censorship as even though censorship plays by rules and attempts to deal with reality, the information tsunami does not.
So, the issue persists, if we cannot agree upon basic facts then how can we communicate effectively with one another?
The Post-Modern Assault
With the advent of postmodern philosophy taking hold of academics, there has been a different assault on truth. By post-modernism, I mean a philosophical movement aimed at questioning the narratives in it from a deconstructive lens.
While this article is not aimed at speaking full length about post-modernism, it will address a school of thought stemming from it. That school of thought is radical skepticism. In traditional philosophical discourse, skepticism is defined as a belief that there are no or limited ways to objectively know anything.
Radical skepticism takes the extreme form that nothing can be known besides the subjective experience of the person. This means there are multiple ways of "knowing".
Each cultural and ancestral tradition has its own claim to knowledge and not respecting that is seen as oppressive. Unlike the epistemic succession of the political right, the left has problematized our shared sense of reality under the guise of fairness.
Who is to say your way of knowing is more accurate than my way? Who is to say western science is better than eastern wisdom?
But this is a different assault on truth, one where good intentions have led us to unsavory conclusions. This is another form of opinion trumping data, objectivity, truth, and the scientific process.
This subjectivist/relativist assault on truth eats away at what we can collectively know as a society. It poisons sciences norm of universalism, the idea that physics or medicine would apply to all seems strange under this ideology.
In Jonathan Rauch’s other book Kindly Inquisitors, he outlines perfectly the type of assault post-modernism has on truth which he dubs egalitarian.
egalitarian, grounded in fairness: your ideas are oppressive in and of themselves, and expressing them disadvantages some perspectives or groups; or, as some argue, the very idea of objective truth silences or marginalizes oppressed groups…
- Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch
By throwing away our shared sense of reality to subjectivism via radical skepticism brought on by post-modernist thought we can hinder meaningful progress, knowledge building, and truth-finding.
Final Thoughts
So, is truth dead?
I think the current assault on truth is killing the idea of truth in the minds of many individuals.
However, there are many factors leading the charge of assaulting truth. These factors are epistemic secession, the information tsunami, the nature of disinformation online, and postmodern thought.
However, despite these factors truth is still clinging to life as we saw great technological and scientific advancements of the mRNA vaccines, journalism still attempting to fact check, and social media companies attempting to cull the onslaught of disinformation on their platforms.
So the question remains, how do we defend truth?
There are no easy answers, but we need to rebuild our sense of a shared reality. This means building up our institutions again, respecting expertise, getting involved with government policy, and demanding more protection and transparency from big tech companies.
More on these different strategies later, but in order to address the problem we need to acknowledge there is a problem in the first place.