Living in a Post-Truth World
The book 1984, written by the British author George Orwell and published in 1949 (after World War II), depicts a dystopian society where historical fact is controlled by the Ministry of Truth, which is the protagonist's Winston place of work.
What Orwell so tactfully captured in his work -- very much a direct product of his real-world experience of the post-war propaganda machine -- is the chilling realization that there's much to gain from controlling and molding what most people consider as true.
To use a current-day terminology, the fictional population depicted lived in a Post-Truth world: they were unable to tell what was true and what was not.
It is of immediate realization that, in such terms, the ones which are able to control the narrative effectively yield near-unlimited influence over the opinion of the majority of the population.
We, as human beings, are storytelling creatures: concrete stories -- true or otherwise -- are way more effective at being understood, accepted and passed forward than abstract facts -- even if the latter is backed by data and rigorously laid out reasoning.
For example, as a way to understand ourselves, we seek out stories that tell us: “where did the first humans come from?”, “how did the world came to be?”, and “what is humanity's place in the universe?”.
While there's no scientific controversy for these three questions -- the case is pretty much settled and the evidence is overwhelming -- there's still current day controversy about which stories are allowed to be told. There's a struggle, mind you, not to find and teach what's true, but to control the narrative in people's minds. Sounds familiar, right?
What Orwell couldn't have predicted is that narrative control would not be exerted by constraining the flow of information to support the desired agenda, but instead by going in the other direction: narrative control, in the current day, is exerted by generating an uncontrollable and constant fire hose of irrelevant, poorly examined, or outright incorrect information.
It so happens that by the time the first claim can be carefully examined, the tenth piece of information is already being relayed and, by then, the damage is already done: that previous piece of information is so juicy and sticky that it is already accepted and housed in people's minds.
It is certainly a challenge to find out what's true when there's so much vested interest in intentionally designing and disseminating another fact which sounds true and that plays to what people would like to be true.