The truth about "post-truth"

In the modern West, truth clashes with political agency

When I say we live in an age of post-truth, I do not mean that politicians lie more often, or that they have given up on lying coherently, or even that they are deliberately trying to dissolve the distinction between truth and falsehood. I mean something more fundamental.

Millions of citizens today find truth itself oppressive. They feel it oppresses their political agency.

Their choice - and “choice” is not meant literally - is between denying what’s true and remaining psychologically intact, or accepting it and feeling stifled, powerless and lost.

They give up on truth not because they are ignorant or stupid, but because a truthful account of their circumstances leads them to despair.

A lesson follows, which technocratic centrist politicians still struggle to learn. Stop trying to lecture people back into truth. Instead, help them recover a sense of political agency.

What does this mean in practice? The first practical step is to suspend technocracy as a style of governance. This is what it means procedurally, without touching on particular policy commitments.

I Consent emergencies

Treat policy areas which suffer a severe lack of civic consent as raging fires which you need to put out. If dismantling the policy is extremely dangerous or impossible, embark on re-persuading citizens from scratch, as though they were encountering both the policy and their society for the first time.

II Consent before policy

You almost never implement major change without securing public consent for it. In future, public consent should come first, policy second.

III Losing vs being wrong

In a post-truth age with radical polarisation, government decisions will regularly go against large sections of the citizenry. When this happens, tell citizens against whom you decided that they have lost, not that they are wrong. “Your claim was valid. It clashed with another valid claim. This time, the decision went against you.”

IV De-scaralise policy

Stop embedding policy positions into your conception of what the country is. The present requires a wider political normal than the recent past. Constraining it to a narrow normal risks losing all capacity to get citizens to agree that any normal exists at all.

V Be proactive

Act. Take initiative. Over-communicate. Declare your vision.

VI Acknowledge

Acknowledge directly the four emotions of distrust citizens feel: unsafety, betrayal, powerlessness, and above all opacity - the sense that the game of politics has ceased to be intelligible.

VII Apologise

Apologise for decisions taken by your predecessors with insufficient public consultation. Promise not to repeat this error.

Conclusion

Democracy does not survive unless it is tethered to the practiced virtue of truthfulness. But you reach truthfulness by restoring agency. You do not reach agency by lecturing people into truthfulness. If you ignore this, appeals to truth become not a defence of democracy, but a pathological expression of political demophobia.