Saving Truth: Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World

In January 2016, just as the post-truth year began, Adam Hoffman reported the surprising results of several studies that concluded the findings of certain sciences are difficult to reproduce.

Unlike postmodernism, the post-truth mindset acknowledges objective truth, but subordinates it to preferences. That’s dangerous, as logic and evidence don’t have the same influence over the post-truth mindset that they had over a postmodern.

Where postmodernism failed because it was inherently incoherent, the post-truth mindset may succeed because it is not. It faces the problem of truth head-on.

“What’s true for you may not be true for me,” we would hear. Or someone might say, “There’s no such thing as objective truth.”

The second mode is “hard,” by which I mean a willingness to propagate blatant falsehoods, knowing they’re false, because doing so serves a higher political or social agenda.

The first is a “soft” mode, by which I mean that we may acknowledge that truth exists—or that certain things are true—but we don’t care about the truth if it gets in the way of our personal preferences.

“Fake news” allowed agendas to advance regardless of, and often contrary to, the truth.

According to Oxford Dictionaries, post-truth means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”