What Next For Truth

That’s the tricky bit. This politics plays to the primal in pursuit of nothing more than the granting of power.

If it had an agenda, then it could be confronted with counter proposals. But the agenda is simply repudiation, and repudiation based on an appeal to instinctive responses, of envy, anxiety and fear.

I guess that’s what we lost with the end of the cold war: some concrete ideological contest, some clash of competing, sincerely held, propositions. In the vacuum the right has positioned itself better, building on the existing absence of new ideas implied by traditional conservatism and refining the approach to the point where it floats free from any idea at all and instead relies on appeals to instinct.

Truth is lost in that of course. And therein lies the great bind for both progressives and conservatives of serious conviction: that the new politics cannot be countered by appeals to fact, to the concrete reality of things.

You have to hope that’s wrong, because countering the politically fantastic, especially when it is loaded with appeals to basic and often quietly dark instinct, is a tricky ask. Truth is lost.

Hard to underestimate the role that the failure of traditional journalistic practice has had in this decent. Playing ‘He said, she said’ too often simply amplifies malicious falsehood; and that assumes good and carefully balanced intention on the part of the news provider.

Too often that’s not the case. Too often the provider is an accomplice to the campaign of misinformation, a political actor.

We know all this, it’s obvious, but cumulatively it’s also hard not to conclude that the structures of politics and information are at best being tested, or perhaps have even been defeated, by the manipulation of cynical opportunists and those who see both power and profit in factless chaos.

We live in a system grounded in an assumption of fundamentally good intentions. Of course people have always played the game for power, but most often for power with an end based on conviction. Make power alone the pure and simple end of the process and things come adrift.

I’m not sure anyone has cracked the code yet, the systematic response to all of this. This instinct is to carry on powered by the certainty of just belief. To enact policy and then rely on the solid reality of people’s life experience to counter the malignant fantasy reality the new media politics seeks to assemble around it.

Is that enough, when too often people are convinced to ignore the evidence of their eyes and lives in favour of a fantasy of fear? It’s a true test, of truth against the simple will to power. And truth may not be enough.