[FoxNews] We are supposed to live in a post-truth world—I have said so myself, and more than once. What does that mean? Basically, that trust in our interpreters of truth—the elites, the mediating class, whatever one chooses to call them—has evaporated. We haven’t believed our presidents for at least a generation. We haven’t believed the news media and other organs of information since the advent of the web. At some point during the COVID-19 pandemic, we stopped believing our institutions of science.Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition.
Our cognitive need for a framework carries an interesting consequence. Information doesn’t occur spontaneously in nature, to be picked like a wildflower for our delectation. It is always generated by human beings, to fit some human purpose. This subjective element in information is usually treated with suspicion, for good reason: We tend to distort reality in our favor. But considered as a sort of universal framework—a boundary condition of truth—it can open a door out of our present predicament.