Are We Entering a Post-Truth Era?

Turning on the news these days, it may seem like people have abandoned the idea of Truth in favor of their own beliefs. With news sources going at each other’s throats, politicians using stage manipulation tactics instead of rhetoric, and constant outrage plastered all over our social media, it can feel like nobody cares about reality anymore. The question arises, have we entered a time when the respect that we humans have for Truth will slowly decline until it fades away?

I think not. I think it likely that the idea of a post-truth era comes from the availability heuristic. As humans, we have a set of cognitive biases, shortcuts we take in our reasoning, which often lead us astray. The availability heuristic is a bias where we put more weight on what we see, without finding out whether this small amount of information is an accurate representation of the whole. Take a break from the screen and the newspaper, and pay attention to the people around you. You can probably tell that they are interested in true knowledge, even if you disagree with them on some things. The news runs on sensational stories, so the regular, polite, average person gets pushed to the side, and all we see are those who are loud and have their blind spots on display.

The truth of something is not always obvious to everyone. It would be easy to think of something that you know nothing about, such as the most abundant species of algae in the world. Yet there is someone out there who knows it like the name of a best friend. Even if something seems obvious to you, there are people who have never considered it before, and those people may have some knowledge that seems obvious to them, but that you have never thought of before.

I don’t think this state of many groups of people disagreeing about all kinds of things and having their own “truth” is new, I just think that with the age of the internet, these different views are being exposed to regular people on a global scale. For the first time in history, knowledge and opinions are easy to come by, so all of the weird things that people believe are suddenly on display. The tempting reaction to this is, “that’s not right, stupid. Have some common sense,” but we seldom realize that we ourselves may have views that they see as equally obviously wrong.

The thought that in some golden age of the past everybody had common sense and believed the truth, is an illusion. Everybody believed whatever they wanted in the past too, we just couldn’t see it. But that’s not all. You see, there is something special about Truth: it fits together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. With information freely available, even with so much nonsense out there, anyone with an honest interest in the pursuit of Truth has a much easier time nowadays than they did in the past. I think it is safe to assume that the average person desires to become smarter and wiser, and because of this new opportunity, they will, and so will humanity as a whole. Instead of entering a post-truth era, I believe we are emerging from a pre-truth era. The unrest and outrage we see all around are merely the birth pangs of a new age of Enlightenment, where knowledge and wisdom abound, and the good people of humanity can join together in creativity and cooperation.