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In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
-George Orwell
Introduction
Any discussion of post-truth implies an assumed understanding of truth. In order to analyse post-truth, one has to at first grapple, with the notion of truth. Does truth refer to facts and evidence? Can we access an objective truth and if there never was any 'real' truth and only truths, then what is this sudden fuss over post-truth and what are its implications? These questions in themselves pose a very postmodernist scepticism about the truth in general.
If truth then is so precarious, then what are the theoretical groundings of the post -truth. In my paper I will critically evaluate the phenomenon of post-truth and its relationship with postmodernism, accentuated with the rise of social media. There has been an evident surge in the academic publications on post-truth with writers like, Michiku Kakutani, Lee McIntyre and Ari Rabin-Havt along with Palgrave Macmillan anthology on Post-truth and contemporary society shows the urgency of the posttruth debate.
Post-truth today as it exist, is an extreme manipulation of the fertile grounds laid by postmodern theories. Both cultural critic Kakutani and McIntyre hurriedly trace Trump era post-truth politics which has had a ripple effect through out the world,with the rise of the right wingers to the postmodernism. Trump or other right wing politicians may not quote Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard but as McIntyre writes "the germ of the idea made its way to them." The paper will analyse the "germ" in the more nuanced perspective of the major postmodernist theories and its direct or indirect bearings on the present post-truth scenario.
With contenders like "Brexiteer" and "Altright", post-truth won the race for 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. Given the politcal undercutting of the words in the list, it is clear that post-truth translated the tenors of the time. The two historic decisions namely, US presidential election and the Brexit vote in the recent history were dominated by sensational lying and obfuscation of facts, undermining the notion of truth. During the Brexit vote, many buses carried false statistics that UK sends 350 million euros a week to EU, while Trump famously lied about almost everything. These two landmark events in ways...